


Teaching Poetry to Fish

by aeli_kindara



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Divergent after S14, Canon Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Castiel Backstory, Castiel Saves Dean Winchester From Hell, DCBB 2019, Dean in Hell, Dean/Cas Big Bang (Supernatural), Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Inspired by Poetry, Led Zeppelin References, M/M, Memory Loss, Mind Control, POV Castiel, Pre-Series, Season/Series 14, Slow Burn, and everything in between
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-06 02:16:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 52,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21218918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: In which Castiel teaches poetry to fish. Also, himself. Also, eventually, Dean.(A series-long story, diverging slightly from canon after S14.)





	1. Nil Mortalibus

**Author's Note:**

> It's hard to believe I've been working on this story for over a year — and it's finally here! So many thanks to everyone who's helped it on its way. Especially:
> 
>   * [BeesAreAwesome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeesAreAwesome), my incredible artist, whose work you can see [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21271547)! I've been beside myself with joy for the entire process of working with her. She also was kind enough to beta read for me — thank you, Bees!
>   * [Remmy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/remmyme), without whose beta reading and general flailing I would be lost. Thank you for sharing my vision of Castiel and threatening to murder me on a daily basis. <3
>   * Bea ([vaudelin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaudelin)), my partner in emotional crime, who has been letting me torment her with snippets of this for many moons now, and returns the torment in kind.
>   * [Natalie](https://www.hypable.com/author/nataliefisher/), who deserves thanks for a laundry list of things ranging from "getting me back into Supernatural in the first place" to "finding the blackberries." Glad I internet-stalked you, friend. <3
>   * [Cass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imogenbynight/pseuds/imogenbynight), who was the first person to ever read any of this, and my first and only trusted source for Led Zeppelin opinions.
>   * And of course the incredible DCBB mods for running this challenge!
> 
> (All of these people are also incredibly talented writers and creators, and listing them boggles me with how lucky I am to exist in their orbits. Links to their work are above. If you don't know them: know them.)
> 
> Minor warnings for canon-typical violence and brief mention of canonical relationships between Dean/others and Cas/others.
> 
> Without further ado — here. Have a fic.

At first it was Enochian.

Enochian poetry is honestly — not good. _ You breed with the mouth of a goat _ is pretty par for the course; angels are many things, but dreamers they are not. “Zah doh rah fid ohr,” Castiel tells a perplexed-looking chondrichthyan, one day in the mid-Carboniferous, and it merely swims away.

But Zachariah said there were big plans for these fish, and Castiel isn’t one to question.

He’s pretty sure that whatever those plans are, understanding Enochian isn’t among them.

\---

He’s not sure why fish; he’s not sure why poetry. He’s also not sure what _ counts _ as fish after a while, because they’ve acquired legs and all kinds of other names now that they’ve learned to breathe air. Soon enough, there’s a variety called humans, and Michael declares their Father’s will that all angels bow down to them; they have fire, _ ideas, _ a sense of themselves.

They’re beautiful. They don’t seem to view themselves as fish.

In fact, they say as much, because they have languages of their own; they write their own poetry. Castiel might like to discuss it with some of them — they really are _ full _ of interesting thoughts, these new creatures — but human contact is strictly controlled: love them, but only from afar, except when God says otherwise.

“I think they’re talking about you,” Castiel informs an oarfish one day, bobbing cross-legged around 3,000 _ pedes _ below the surface of the Mare Ionium. Everything is twilight down here, and the eyes of his vessel, a Scythian archer, can barely read the words on the papyrus in his hand. Castiel soothes the strain, filling her eyes instead with the light of divine knowledge. He’s fond of her; she’s been his vessel for several centuries now, and he tries to ease things for her when he can.

“_What step of death feared he who with dry eyes,_” he reads, carefully, “_beheld the swimming monsters of the deep? _ Now, don’t get me wrong, we _ have _ plenty of sea monsters, but we haven’t deployed any near Oricum in the last few centuries. These Romans also seem awfully fixated on sea serpents, if their art is anything to go by; I can see them thinking you’re a serpent.” He tilts his vessel’s head, considering the words on the page. “Though it could mean something else. _ Monstra natantia_. Swimming monsters, swimming — wonders? Swimming omens. Visions. Portents.”

The oarfish regards him skeptically, undulating its dorsal fin. Its body is as long, end to end, as half a dozen men. Its flanks are marked in black scribbles that look almost like writing.

“What do you think?” Castiel asks it. “Would you like to be a portent?”

It doesn’t answer, just keeps watching him. Its body coils, shivers, straightens, like a horse dislodging a fly.

The fin that stretches the length of that body is brilliant red. In the half-light, Castiel’s human eyes can’t perceive it, but his grace can. It takes him a moment to map that color onto the puny neuronal pathways that will transmit it to his vessel’s consciousness, but he feels the reward of her half-sleeping gasp at the beauty of it. Her reactions never cease to delight him. He wishes he’d known how special she was when he first possessed her; he wishes he’d thought, before the rush of his power drowned her memories, to learn her name.

There’s a line in the poem that strikes him. It makes him uncomfortable, too; he always wants to look away from it. To skip to the next line, to pretend it doesn’t exist.

The poet is speaking to a ship — a ship about to bear his friend to distant lands. Begging it to keep the friend safe. The men have names, and fairly famous ones, Castiel knows, within their small circles of time and place, but the names don’t matter. What matters is: _ serves animae dimidium meae. _

_ Preserve my very being’s other half. _ What does that mean? To have another half of your being — your soul? Castiel didn’t think souls had halves; his entire understanding of the design specifications is that they’re meant to be singular things. One per human. They don’t — divide like that. Or bleed into each other. Do they?

Did his vessel have another half, forgotten somewhere those centuries ago, long-dead now and buried in the snows of the steppe?

Is _ he _ her other half now? Is she his?

“_But even so, some far-foreseeing god,_” he reads softly, “_divided once the oceans from the shores. Yet still —_”

This poet is just as confused as Castiel is. _ But even so, yet still _ — yet still —

He clears his throat.

“_Yet still impious vessels skim the seas,_  
_And blight the waters that unsullied were._  
_But is this not the course of human life?_  
_To plunge through sin, forbidden though it is,_  
_And dare to suffer all in recompense?_”

His voice cracks, for all that it’s not a voice; for all that everything about this body is half invention, for all that he’s speaking through seawater under a hundred atmospheres’ worth of pressure, and his vocal chords shouldn’t work anyway. He blinks, refocuses on the page.

“_...So Daedalus once tried the airy void_  
_With wings the gods had granted not to man;_  
_So Hercules forced past the Acheron;_  
_His labor overwhelmed the might of Dis._

_ Nothing is hard for those destined to die._  
_Our folly bids us seek the sky itself._  
_Nor does our evil once allow the gods_  
_To lay their holy vengeance to a rest._”

It’s the end of the poem. He stares at the words — _ nil mortalibus ardui est _ — and doesn’t really see them.

“Of course,” he tells the oarfish, “it’s _ one _God, not gods. Pesky miscommunication there. We’ve got plans underway to address it.” That’s what Zachariah said, anyway. Castiel should listen to him; Zachariah is an archangel, after all.

_ Preserve my very being’s other half. _ And yet, this poet entrusts this other half to an impious ship. Or so he believes; as far as Castiel _ knows_, no one’s punishing seafarers.

But — would he know? Would they honestly tell him, if that were policy these days?

Sometimes it seems like everything’s gotten so messy. God, gods, chosen people, good and evil and free will, if free will isn’t a myth. Sometimes Castiel’s a little overwhelmed by it all. Sometimes he has — doubts.

_ Nil mortalibus ardui est. _ But Castiel isn’t mortal, and he always thought that made things simple. What if it doesn’t? What if it makes things hard?

His vessel used to be mortal. She isn’t anymore. She’s existed in childlike stasis for centuries, amused and animated by the tidbits of experience he feeds to her. Sometimes he catches glimpses of the fire and steel that used to be hers. Sometimes he recalls her prayer to him: a devout queen seeking divine aid for her people’s war. He said he would provide it. He didn’t. There were more important things going on at the time.

What if her other half is waiting for her in Heaven? What if she’s been waiting all this time to return to them — to be whole?

Castiel shakes his head. “Thank you,” he says to the oarfish, and goes.

He leaves her where he found her. Then, it was the center of an encampment on the plains, banners waving as red as the oarfish’s fin. Now it’s empty. Windblown. Desolate.

“I think it might be time for me to leave you,” Castiel tells her. “To let you move on. Would you like that?”

_ Castiel. _ There’s a voice in his head, oddly familiar, but he doesn’t think he knows it. _ This is no time for this behavior. We have a mission for you. _

“Would you like that?” he repeats, slowly, trying to clear his head of all but the Scythian.

_ Castiel, desist immediately and return to Heaven. This is a command. _

He’ll be there. He’ll be there _ soon. _ He just has to —

“We’ll just lie down,” he tells her, “so you can see the sky.”

She likes the sky. He feeds it to her, bit by bit, until it fills every one of her senses, until the freedom and the blue and the gentle brush of air unfold through the vaults of her mind. He feeds her the golden eagle, wheeling high above. He feeds her the grass at her back, scratchy but soft, and the clouds racing to reinvent themselves across the sky. He feeds her the chilly scent of winter on its way, and the soft one of dying summer in the bleached little grass seeds that litter the ground. He feeds her the stars, too, somewhere beyond the blue. He feeds her a distant oarfish.

When he pulls back, he does it gently. He can see her face shrivel with age, her bones weaken, her eyes dim. He can see her wizened soul begin to coalesce, to rise.

It leaves her body slowly — lovingly. Maybe it’s going to find its other half.

_ Castiel. _ The voice in his head is insistent. _ Report for duty, now. _

But of course he will. He was planning to anyway; he simply had to take care of this first.

“Castiel.” It’s the voice from his head. He’s in Heaven. There’s no need for vessels here, but she’s wearing the guise of one anyway, a smiling woman with something cold behind her eyes. “My name is Naomi. You won’t remember me, I think. Will you step into my office please?”

Something clenches cold inside him. Something — fearful. Something human.

But Castiel is not human, not even half. He is an angel, and it is not his to rebel.

He smiles. “Of course,” he says, and Naomi gestures, and he follows her inside.

\---

Some of the heavens have fish.

That delights Castiel when he discovers it: that humans can bring other living things to Heaven with them, that their tiny souls can hold so much of the world. He’s never spent too much time among the heavens before, or at least he doesn’t recall that he has; but now he realizes that he can drop in on any of thousands of paradises. Millions.

He’s mostly confined to Naomi’s wing these days. “Confined,” at least, in the sense that it’s the only place he has any orders to be: rows of clean white beds in a room with other angels who never meet his eyes.

It’s boring, though. He only has appointments once a week. And he has vague days, sometimes — a lot of the time — days when he can’t quite remember who he is and where he’s supposed to be.

He doesn’t _ mean _ to go wandering, or to make anyone upset. It just happens sometimes. The halls are so full of delights; it’s easy to forget they aren’t his to sample.

There’s one heaven that belongs to a Chinese poet. It’s simple — just a small boat drifting on a pool of a quiet river — but things change there, more than in most of the heavens. Liu Zongyuan catches fish, and releases them; the seasons come and go.

Sometimes, Liu writes. They’re the works of his life on Earth, Castiel understands; he’s creating nothing afresh. Still, they’re different, from day to day. _ I had so long been troubled by official hat and robe, _ he writes one morning, _ that I am glad to be an exile here in this wild southland _. _ Back and forth I go, scarcely meeting anyone, / and sing a long poem and gaze at the blue sky. _

On some days Liu isn’t there at all. Some days he seems to dissolve into the landscape, into his pages, into the quietly rippling water.

Castiel steps into the fishing boat alone, once. He pushes it out, and the prow cuts the water cleanly, without a sound. There’s a single page lying in the center of the boat, with four lines of characters on it. The black ink is clear and crisp on the white paper.

_ A hundred mountains and no bird,_  
_A thousand paths without a footprint;_  
_A little boat, a bamboo cloak,_  
_An old man fishing in the cold river-snow._

Castiel drifts there for a long time. The fish dart in patterns. Liu is all around him, and nowhere. He stays until the promised snow begins to fall.

Then he gets out of the boat and goes to Naomi’s office for his next session, and after that he never remembers Liu’s heaven at all.

\---

Things get complicated, around the sixteenth century.

Humans are developing new notions of their place in the cosmos. In Europe, they’re throwing off the strictures of the Catholic Church, which has always related itself to Heaven in ways Castiel finds hard to follow. Men in various corners are scribbling out mathematical equations and declaring that the Earth revolves around the sun — which is true, of course, though it has never seemed troublesome to Castiel — and then one Italian with a telescope comes along to prove it, and the Church loses its collective mind.

The trouble is, Heaven doesn’t have that much better an idea what to make of it all than humanity does. Reformations and revolutions, the satirical and the sublime; it all passes in the eyeblinks of human lifetimes. _ Leave the mud monkeys to their own devices, _ some angels say, and others, _ they need to be corrected — pared down — another flood — _

Which would be just fine by most of the fish, Castiel supposes, but he’s getting attached to these two-legged ones.

That the angels are arguing is a scandal in its own right. There are supposed to be orders, and clear ones, but the archangels are silent; the lack of directive presses at Castiel’s grace with an urgent sort of hum — a _ need. _ At last, Zachariah appears to declare:

“Our Father wishes to monitor the situation. We will send select angels to take vessels in the Inquisition and surrounding organizations soon. You will receive your orders shortly.”

Which is how Castiel ends up spending much of the 1600s as a member of the Anglican clergy.

It’s different from previous missions he’s had. At least he thinks it is; the details of his previous missions tend to fog up when he focuses on them. In this one, he’s supposed to be undercover; supposed to let his vessel’s instincts, his vessel’s experience, take the reins. In the end, that means he spends some forty years eating a great deal of rich and tasteless food, taking bribes, and generally being bored out of his mind.

He’s not supposed to be capable of boredom. He thinks his vessel is a bad influence on him. He takes his refuge in walks in the countryside and browsing through circulars from his vessel’s friend John Donne.

Donne is a priest, too. A new kind of priest, as such things go, and one Castiel thinks his vessel envies; a priest with a wife and children and a canon of poetry that alludes strongly to his carnal knowledge of the world.

Castiel doesn’t quite understand why his vessel carries no interest in following his friend’s example. Priests are allowed to marry, now; they’re allowed love.

But — though his vessel aches for that, or something like it — he doesn’t _ want _ it. Castiel can never quite figure out why.

“_Come live with me, and be my love, / and we will some new pleasures prove,_” he reads aloud one day, under a willow by a stream. The boughs here hide him from the farmers working in their fields, and he can sense fish moving in the murky water near his feet. “_Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, / with silken lines, and silver hooks._”

There’s an eel in the stream, long and powerful. It’s been living there as long as Castiel’s held this vessel — fifteen years now and counting. Little glass elvers dart around it, on their spring arrival from the distant Sargasso Sea. They’ll grow large in this stream, over the years to come; change color three times over. Eventually, like the monster at the bottom of the pool, they’ll begin to grow enormous eyes and silver scales, prepare for the long migration back across the Atlantic Ocean.

Humans have been confused for a very long time about eels. As far as Castiel is aware, they still believe them to be several different species. Aristotle thought they might begin their lives as earthworms. Castiel wonders if Galileo will turn his attention to them next.

“I don’t think you’d be very enthusiastic about the silver hooks,” Castiel tells the eel. “And this stream is more muddy than crystal.”

It doesn’t answer.

“_There will the river whispering run, / warm'd by thy eyes, more than the sun _ — I believe he’s still speaking of a woman — _ and there the 'enamour'd fish will stay, / begging themselves they may betray._” Castiel studies the eel. It’s curled in the shadows under the bank; it doesn’t seem likely to come out. “Do you _ often _ find yourself drawn to strange women?”

“Father?” says a voice, uncertain, behind him.

Castiel drops the manuscript quickly, then scrambles to retrieve a page that nearly flutters into the water. He stands. It’s taken him some practice to heave his vessel’s bulk about as if he had only human strength.

“Ah,” he says, striving for composure as he turns to face the young man squinting into the willow’s shade.

He can’t be more than twenty years old, by Castiel’s tenuous grasp of human aging. Perhaps twenty-five. The angles of his face still bear the softness of youth. He’s wearing dirt-stained breeches and a loose white shirt, and the skin of his chest is tanned where the collar gapes wide. There’s a hoe in his hand.

“I apologize for surprising you,” Castiel tells him, formally. His vessel’s hand moves, automatic, to smooth the fabric of his cassock where it bunches around his belly. “I like, sometimes, to practice my sermons to the fish.”

The boy is frowning. “Is that — a sermon, then?” 

“It’s a poem,” Castiel answers, with dignity.

They stand there for some time. The boy has sandy hair and abundant freckles. The elbows of his shirt are patched many times over. Castiel feels an odd fondness spike beneath his sternum, watching the boy watch him.

“Well,” says the boy, after a while, “good luck then, Father.”

“And to you as well.” On an impulse, Castiel draws a coin from his vessel’s purse. “Please. For a new shirt.”

The boy hesitates for a moment. His frown deepens, but he takes the coin. Castiel watches him leave, unsure of the sensation in his vessel’s chest.

The eel is still there. Castiel gathers the papers from his feet. For a moment, he considers beginning the walk home; he feels restless. He hesitates, sighs — glances down at the sheet in his hand.

“_Let others freeze with angling reeds,_” he quotes, “_and cut their legs with shells and weeds; / or treacherously poor fish beset, / with strangling snare, or windowy net._”

Castiel has never had cause for _ catching _ fish before. Neither, it seems from the curl of distaste in his gut, has his vessel. It doesn’t sound like a very pleasant enterprise.

“_Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest_  
_the bedded fish in banks out-wrest;_  
_or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies,_  
_bewitch poor fishes' wand'ring eyes._”

The eel is moving. It ripples through the water, out of sight; then, for a moment, its back crests the surface.

Castiel feels a strange sense of melancholy. He’s not sure if it’s his vessel’s or his own. “_For thee, thou need’st no such deceit,_” he says. He pauses. “_For thou thyself art thine own bait —_”

There’s a hard lump in his vessel’s throat. He doesn’t understand why.

He doesn’t speak the final lines of the poem aloud as he collects himself to go. He merely murmurs them on his grace, as if the eel might understand. The eel, or the boy in the field, bent low again over his work.

_ That fish, that is not catch’d thereby — alas! is wiser far, than I. _

Humans, he thinks, are strange creatures. He will never understand them.

Still, he wonders, as they begin the slow walk home, if there isn’t something in the world that might actually make this one _ happy_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems quoted in this chapter include:
> 
> Horace, “Carmina 1.3” (trans. me)  
Liu Zongyuan, “Dwelling by a Stream”  
Liu Zongyuan, “River Snow”  
John Donne, “The Bait”


	2. This Little Alban House

For the next four hundred years, the Heavenly Host devotes itself to intelligence.

Castiel’s garrison reorganizes twice without any real occasion for combat. Commanders come and go. He gets sent on reconnaissance detail a few more times, but it seems that even those efforts have been scaled back; he hears whispers that angels on surveillance have a habit of getting unruly. Developing inappropriate questions, feelings, doubts. He spends long decades on ice.

By the time Ishim arrives in the garrison headquarters with news of their flight’s deployment, one autumn day in the year the humans are calling 1901, Castiel hasn’t been on Earth, even briefly, in nearly two hundred years.

He needs a vessel. They all do, except for Benjamin, who’s been carefully tending to the one he picked up in Spain, back in Inquisition days. She’s dark-skinned and lovely, always dressed in a gown of immense proportions. It seems to expand to fill any room she enters, like an angel’s true form, like a gas; but somehow her frail human form only looks larger for all that around it, eyes brighter, smile sharp. The rich brocade of her skirt sweeps wide, monumental, and the gown’s sleeves froth around her wrists.

Castiel can’t help but admire it — the vessel and her clothing both. Benjamin confided in him, once, that his vessel never had such fine things before they found each other. That it brings him joy to learn what pleases her. Castiel has never enjoyed such a close relationship with one of his vessels; such mutual respect. At least — he frowns — not that he can recall —

“Benjamin,” says Ishim, cutting through his thoughts, “go get that thing some new clothes, will you? You’ll look idiotic, dragging your pet around in _ that._”

Beside Castiel, Benjamin stiffens — incrementally, invisibly, and yet the snap of tension down his grace is a frisson through the room. His eyes meet Ishim’s for a bare moment in something like challenge.

Then he says, “Yes, sir,” and an instant later, he’s gone.

Ishim waits a long moment before returning his focus to the rest of the flight. “The issue at hand,” he says, “is Akobel. He’s taken up with a human woman.”

Castiel stifles an astonished exclamation. He doesn’t dare glance to the angels around him, but they must be thinking the same thing he is. Akobel’s a good angel; a good soldier. For him to be so tempted — to fall so far —

“His sentence is death.” Ishim’s tone is hard. “But we must be cautious. This human woman — Lily Sunder is her name. I have had dealings with her. She is a female scholar — unnatural even by _ their _ standards.”

There’s a sneer on his face. It sits oddly with Castiel. Gender has never mattered to angels; why should it to Ishim?

“She has studied our ways. No doubt Akobel has revealed too many of our secrets already. Be on your guard.”

His hands are flexing oddly on his thighs. What does that indicate? Castiel hasn’t had cause to read human body language in a very long time.

Ishim presses an image into their minds: a large, yellow house. Orono, Maine. He says, “Now _ go._”

Which is an order, and one Castiel can follow, easily enough.

But he’s — curious. He has — not doubts, or even questions, really, but —

It’s just that he hasn’t been among humans in many long years. He remembers finding them enthralling creatures; their heavens alone attest to that. Still. He’s never felt tempted to do as Akobel’s done. He’s never felt the urge to take up with one like _ that. _

She must be — truly extraordinary. Truly special.

It doesn’t make sense to Castiel; _ all _ the humans seem rather extraordinary. Why should this one be any different?

He won’t do anyone any harm, just looking around, as he circles for a vessel. Seeing what’s changed since his last visit. Perhaps Lily Sunder is a new type of human; what does he know of her? A female scholar. A large, yellow house, in the rocky northern woods. Not too far from the coast of the thundering Atlantic.

Castiel remembers salmon in those waters, racing up those rivers and streams. He remembers following hunting parties through maples, oaks, pines.

But North America has changed since his last visit — almost shockingly so. It’s gridded by railroads; he can’t find bison anywhere. The forests are in shambles, the valleys dimpled with towns. The Pocomtuc villages he remembers along the Connecticut River are gone, replaced by mills and bridges.

He finds her at a desk in a large, yellow house: his own lady scholar.

She has dark hair, swept up behind her head, and a shrewd, pointed face. She’s bent over a hand-stitched booklet of fine stationery paper, covered in broad, loose script. There’s a printed book in her other hand; she turns to consult it, briefly. Then, she makes a note on the handwritten page in pencil, and turns it over to the next leaf.

Castiel hovers close, briefly overcome by curiosity. It takes him a moment to parse the handwriting.

_ My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - _  
_ In Corners - till a Day _  
_ The Owner passed - identified - _  
_ And carried Me away - _

The flame of the lamp on her desk flickers. She turns abruptly in her chair.

“Who’s there?” she demands.

Castiel hesitates.

The woman stares around her empty room. It’s not quite dark yet, outside, but the light from the windows is meager, and the lamp doesn’t reach to every corner. Its light reflects off the glass-fronted cabinets lined with books; off a fishbowl, its inhabitant obscured; off the gleaming piano against the far wall.

“Come on,” she says, again, loudly. “I know you’re there.”

She’s dressed in layers of the lightest of greens, as if she could invoke spring through sheer willpower from the autumn evening outside. Her eyes are narrowed.

She probably won’t understand him. He’ll probably break things. He thinks, fleetingly, of the fishbowl’s glass.

Castiel says, _ My name is Castiel. _

If it’s even possible, her eyes narrow further. “Okay, then, _ what _ are you?”

She can understand him. He doesn’t have a heart just now, but if he did, he thinks it might beat faster. _ I’m an angel of the Lord. _

For an instant, the woman only blinks.

Then she folds forward over her knees, gasping and shaking with what Castiel realizes — after a long, horrified moment — is laughter.

It takes several minutes for it to calm. When she straightens, she’s wiping tears from her eyes. Castiel can’t reach for her shoulder, but he — presses closer, deepening the shadows in the high corners of the ceiling. _ Are you all right? _

“‘This world is not conclusion,’” she says in answer, and it takes him a moment to realize she’s quoting something. “‘A species stands beyond — invisible, as music, but positive, as sound —’ Emily, you _ cunt._”

Castiel has no idea how to respond. He inquires, after a moment, as politely as he can, _ Did you write that? _

She straightens in her chair, smoothing out the lines of her laugh. “My aunt did. I’m her editor. Martha Dickinson — Mattie.” Her mouth twitches into a smile. “I would offer to shake your hand, but —”

_ I don’t presently have one, I know. _

“Yes,” she agrees. “Do you — _ generally _ lack for hands, angel-of-the-Lord-Castiel?”

_ I require a vessel to walk the Earth. _ He hates the words, a little bit, as they leave him.

“A vessel. You mean — a human?”

_ Yes. _ Castiel’s wings itch. _ I must find one in order to complete my duties. _

“Ah.” Her eyes tense, careful; her thoughts are opaque. “And, um. How does that work?”

_ I locate a worthy candidate. They grant their permission. _

“What then?”

_ In this case, my anticipated mission to Earth is brief. A few days, at most. _ He hesitates. It isn’t standard, but — _ I would make all attempt to return them intact to their home, should they wish it. _

She swallows. Her throat bobs visibly in the lamplight.

She says, very quietly, “Are you asking my permission, Castiel?”

He isn’t sure he wants to.

He’s on a mission.

The fish in the bowl turns, briefly, into the light. The orange-gold of its fin shimmers. It looks magnified for a moment by the curve of the glass; too big for its spare prison.

It’s small — this room. This life.

Castiel says, _ Yes. _

“Oh, what the hell, then,” says Mattie Dickinson. “It’ll be an adventure.”

\---

The sun is bleeding across the horizon by the time Castiel and Mattie sweep clear of her window, the high gables of the house, the dim shade of a sheltering pine. It ignites the hills orange and purple and gold, and Mattie’s thoughts sing through both of them: _ how the old mountains drip with sunset, how the hemlocks burn — _

“Your aunt again?” Castiel guesses.

He feels Mattie’s hum of agreement. _ She was a remarkable woman. I wish I’d known her better in life. But now, her — oh, her words drive me crazy. This is very odd; now you’re the one with the voice. _

“I could attempt to give you access to your vocal cords,” Castiel apologizes. “Speaking honestly, I don’t have much experience with —”

_ Oh, don’t bother, _ Mattie says over him. _ This is quite nice for a change! _

Castiel frowns, soaring higher. “Are you sure? I don’t wish to — lock you up in there —”

He feels her amusement, and his own eyes crinkle. _ The brain is wider than the sky; for, put them side by side — the one the other will contain with ease, and you beside. _

He can’t help but laugh. “Fair enough.”

They find Ishim and Benjamin in the woods outside Orono. They’re standing quietly in the gathering dark, each with blade in hand. Benjamin’s vessel is newly dressed in gray, a costume that matches Mattie’s. Ishim’s wearing a small, sour-faced vessel; he keeps adjusting its vest.

“We will wait for Mirabel and the others,” he says, sparing Castiel’s new vessel barely a dismissive glance. “Take your position.”

Castiel falls in at Ishim’s side. He’s getting used to the relentless chatter of Mattie’s mind, turning over phrases and rhythms, agonizing over dashes and alternate words. He’s not sure, now, if there’s an extra sharpness to her thoughts. _ I never met this fellow, attended or alone, without a tighter breathing and a zero at the bone. _

They wait through the night.

Mattie’s mind is as busy as ever. It turns over leaves and bundles them into folios; explores, backtracks, tests phrases side by side. Castiel doesn’t always understand what the words mean — each one seems packed to bursting with meaning, symbolism just out of reach — but he likes the rhythm of them. He starts to wonder when Mattie finds time to think about her own life, on top of her aunt’s poetry.

It’s nearly dawn when the others arrive. Castiel dispatches two of them to their posts in the surrounding trees with a wave of thought — _ as all the heavens were a bell, and being, but an ear _ — while Mirabel takes her place beside Benjamin. They wait; wait longer. Morning sun crowns the dripping trees, and Ishim leads the way to the house.

He stops once it’s in view. “Castiel, are we all here?”

Castiel smiles. “Yes,” he says, in Mattie’s voice. It’s a warm one, clever; syllables want to trip quickly over her tongue.

Ishim nods. “We’re here because one of our fellow angels has taken a human wife. They also have a small daughter,” he says, his voice grave with the familiar weight of ritual. But Castiel stifles his shock — Ishim hadn’t mentioned _ that, _hadn’t said anything about —

“A nephilim,” he manages, through the horror pooling in his throat. “You’re sure?”

Images flash through his mind; civilizations ended, storms that pierce the earth. _ To pile like Thunder to its close, then crumble grand away _ — should he not have felt a true nephilim being born? But Ishim is his superior; there’s no questioning his orders. And a nephilim, a true nephilim — that’s the most dangerous thing in the universe, angelic grace paired to a human soul. _ Experience either and consume — For None see God and live — _

The two others join them as they march toward the house, melting from their sentinel posts in the woods. The door bangs open, and Akobel is there: long-haired and blonde, with a beard framing his vessel’s face.

The woman is behind him. She stands close at his shoulder, touching his arm, and Castiel knows a wave of revulsion: these two have violated Heaven’s most sacred laws. Akobel whispers something to her, and she disappears inside.

“You have no business here.” Akobel’s voice is strong and even.

But Ishim seems to be almost smiling. “Me? You were sent here to observe humanity, to watch and learn, but instead! Taking up with a filthy animal — have you no shame?”

Akobel’s face tightens. “Who are _ you _ to lecture _ me _ about shame?” He advances down the steps, voice shaking. “Humans aren’t animals. Most of them are good, and true, and — how could anyone know them and _ not _ love them?”

Something shifts uncomfortably in Castiel’s chest. He’s not sure if it’s Mattie or himself.

“Touching,” bites back Ishim, and his voice drips scorn. “But we’re not —”

“I know,” interrupts Akobel, “why you’re here,” and his blade is in his hand.

He lunges for Ishim. But Castiel is lieutenant for a reason; his own blade is at the ready, sweeping out to turn Akobel’s aside. Ishim stands there motionless, smiling — like he’s enjoying this. And Benjamin and Mirabel are there, gripping the arms of Akobel’s vessel, wrestling him back —

“Castiel,” says Ishim, and he knows his cue.

“Akobel,” he begins, “Seraphim of the Sixth Choir. You have lain with a human, and you fathered a nephilim —”

“_What?_” gasps Akobel.

Ishim lunges for him then, seizing his throat. And Mattie’s humming inside him, words spilling from her mind too quickly, too sure:

_ Much madness is divinest sense, to a discerning eye — much sense, the starkest madness — ‘tis the majority — _

“Continue,” says Ishim, as Akobel chokes.

_ In this, as all, prevail — _

“You have broken,” says Castiel, “our most sacred oath, and the penalty is —”

_ Assent, and you are sane — _

Mirabel turns with her blade in her hand, the twist of her shoulder bearing into her thrust. Akobel flares bright-white.

_ Demur, you’re straightway dangerous, and handled with a chain — _

“— death,” Castiel finishes, and Mattie goes silent within him.

Akobel’s body crumples to the ground with a thud. “Dispose of his vessel,” says Ishim, not looking at Castiel. His eyes are on the door. “This next part, I’ll do alone.”

Nephilim are dangerous; Ishim might need backup. But it’s not in Castiel’s nature to object. He watches, instead, as Ishim mounts the steps — as he disappears through the front door —

Mattie’s voice within him is still shocked into silence. But another sounds from inside the house, the woman Lily Sunder: “_No. No! Stay away from my daughter!_”

A girl screams.

And Castiel flinches. He can’t help it. Once more, he’s not sure if it’s Mattie’s instincts playing on her muscles, or his own.

\---

She’s quiet, still, on their trip home.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Castiel tells her. “It was horrible, but it needed to be done. Nephilim are —”

_ They grow up to destroy worlds. I heard you. _

Castiel feels a wave of relief. She’s conscious, at least; she understands. Her horror hasn’t wiped her mind from within her. 

“It was our mission,” Castiel says. “It was right.”

But she’s not speaking to him anymore. Her thoughts have retreated into her poetry, and it’s not her words she gives him now, either; a page shimmers in her mind’s eye, like she’s turning back to it. Away from him.

_ The Feet, mechanical, go round - _  
_ A Wooden way _  
_ Of Ground, or Air, or Ought - _  
_ Regardless grown, _  
_ A Quartz contentment, like a stone - _

He doesn’t try to speak to her again.

He leaves her in her study. Scarcely more than a night has passed, and her work is where she left it. Her body sinks to its chair with a rustle of skirts.

Castiel pulls free gently, trying to give her time to adjust to her own weight, her mundanity.

“Mattie?” There’s a voice floating up from the stair, and both of them startle — Castiel and his vessel. Her shoulders hunch high around her ears. “Did you work all night again? I’ve told you, you’ll ruin your eyes —”

There are footsteps on the stairs, getting closer. Castiel lingers. _ Will you be all right? _ he asks, gentle, weaving his voice with the birdsong and the sound of the rain.

Mattie looks up. Her eyes pierce him, for all that he’s everywhere and nowhere.

She doesn’t answer him. He supposes it might sound odd if she did, to whoever’s fumbling now at the latch of the door; speaking to someone not there. She leans back in her chair, instead, and smooths the rain-flecked bodice of her dress. She tilts her head until she’s looking at the ceiling; beyond the ceiling, eyes fixed on some point neither of them can see.

_ Mattie _ — Castiel frets, unable to help himself.

She jerks, and drops her eyes. Her hands flex, trembling, as they gather her papers, shuffling them into order. One sticks out from the top; she stills, then pulls it loose, and sets it to the side. 

Castiel can’t help himself. He bends close.

It’s the poem Mattie first quoted to him — the one about angels.

Suddenly, he needs to know how it ends. 

He skims down the page; there are footsteps by the door. Labored breathing as someone props a tray on her hip, fumbles for the door.

_ Much Gesture, from the Pulpit - _  
_ Strong Hallelujahs roll - _  
_ Narcotics cannot still the Tooth _  
_ That nibbles at the soul - _

That’s all. It goes no further.

The doorknob clicks, and Mattie turns in her seat. Her face is briefly guilty, briefly longing, briefly terrible with knowledge that can’t be unknown. “Good morning,” she says, in a voice that barely wobbles.

Castiel takes his cue, and goes.

\---

But he can’t — he _ can’t _ — he can’t quite leave it behind. Not entirely.

Weeks pass. Life returns to normal; no one’s discussing it, not even Benjamin. Ishim is his sleek, contented self. And Castiel —

Castiel finds himself wandering, one day, down corridors of Heaven he doesn’t frequently visit. There are names on the doors, signs pointing the direction he wants to go. _ DA-, DE-, DI-, — _

Emily Dickinson’s heaven looks a lot like Mattie Dickinson’s study.

She’s got the same narrow desk, the same view out her window of gardens and trees. The same bookshelves, the same piano, even the same fishbowl; but she’s sitting there scribbling, and Castiel recognizes the loops of her hand.

He clears his throat. “Hello,” he says, awkwardly.

Emily turns. Her face is homelier than Mattie’s, and older, with a stillness in it that might be scorn. “You’re an angel,” she says, flat, then: “what do you want?”

Castiel swallows. “I — I met your niece. Recently. Martha.”

Emily just watches him, like she’s waiting for him to say something worthy of a response.

“She — showed me some of your poetry. It was very — meaningful. Or — hard to figure out, but I thought —”

“What do you _ want?_” Emily says, again, hands fists on her thighs.

“I don’t know,” Castiel admits.

She turns away from him. There’s a tightly contained fury in the line of her shoulders, and this isn’t how Heaven is supposed to work, Castiel thinks; souls in Heaven are supposed to be happy, living a loop of whatever they loved best, but Emily —

“I’ll tell you what _ I _ want,” she says, thrusting a piece of paper at him without looking. When he hesitates, she shakes it and nearly knocks over the fishbowl.

Castiel takes it hastily. He looks down, and reads:

_ Bring me the sunset in a cup - _  
_ Reckon the morning’s flagons up _  
_ And say how many Dew - _  
_ Tell me how far the morning leaps - _  
_ Tell me what time the weaver sleeps _  
_ Who spun the breadths of blue! _

_ Write me how many notes there be _  
_ In the new Robin’s extasy _  
_ Among astonished boughs - _  
_ How many trips the Tortoise makes - _  
_ How many cups the Bee partakes, _  
_ The Debauchee of Dews! _

_ Also, Who laid the Rainbow’s piers, _  
_ Also, Who leads the docile spheres _  
_ By withes of supple blue? _  
_ Whose fingers string the stalactite - _  
_ Who counts the wampum of the night _  
_ To see that none is due? _

_ Who built this little Alban House _  
_ And shut the windows down so close _  
_ My spirit cannot see? _  
_ Who’ll let me out some gala day _  
_ With implements to fly away, _  
_ Passing Pomposity? _

“Well?” Emily demands, when he’s done. “Can you do that?”

Castiel swallows. His throat feels dry; a human affliction. “I — I can explain how rainbows work,” he offers, because he can.

Emily snorts. “Don’t bother. Just don’t bother. Nice to know it was all for more of the same.”

He has to say _ something _ to that. Has to explain himself, or try to explain Heaven; his mouth is opening, the words on his tongue are gathering, and they start with, _ I, too, have — doubts — _

_ Castiel? _ cuts a voice through his thoughts. _ We are gathering. A meeting of the choirs. _

He goes.

When he gets there, they’re all assembled, Naomi pacing before them. “We have new directives,” she says. “Our Father has determined that the time is come to begin working toward the Apocalypse. It will take several human generations; the seeds must be carefully sown. But the Earth is due for a reset. You will all come to visit me soon, for treatment; we need our Heavenly Host at its most glorious, its most righteous, for the coming war.”

Castiel settles back into his seat, comforted.

He has his place. And Heaven has its plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems quoted in this chapter include:
> 
> Emily Dickinson, "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun"  
Emily Dickinson, "This World is not Conclusion"  
Emily Dickinson, "How the old Mountains drip with Sunset"  
Emily Dickinson, "The Brain - is wider than the Sky"  
Emily Dickinson, "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"  
Emily Dickinson, "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"  
Emily Dickinson, "To pile like Thunder to its close"  
Emily Dickinson, "Much Madness is divinest Sense"  
Emily Dickinson, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"  
Emily Dickinson, "Bring me the sunset in a cup"


	3. In Rockland

He dreams, sometimes, of needles. 

That makes no sense, of course, because angels don’t dream. But Castiel is a poor sort of an angel; one who needs appointments with Naomi all the time, to sit and talk and remember the fire within him: _ you are a warrior of God. A soldier — a hammer. His Plan burns inside you, and you are not to question it; the Lord works in mysterious ways. _

She has him read from the Bible. She reminds him of the places he’s been, the terrible glories he’s witnessed. Sodom, Gomorrah. Lot’s wife, a pillar of salt.

Then she takes him into the next room, and —

He never remembers that part. But he dreams, sometimes, of hot lances of fire drilling through his skull; metal, invading, erasing. They must be the unholy thoughts Naomi is trying to protect him from. The ideas that creep in through the dark corners of his consciousness and surface suddenly, even in the heart of his lessons: _ But why? But what if she made a mistake? But didn’t God create humans in His own image, to start? _

He is grateful to Naomi for helping him crush the doubts. She is so patient; so generous with her time.

Years go by.

There’s a room where he stops sometimes, on his way to and from Naomi’s offices. An old man sits there at a reading desk, and never looks up, but around him are shelves upon shelves of books.

That’s what draws Castiel into the room the first time: because there is _ the _ Book Naomi has him read, and Castiel wants to be a good student. He wants to excel.

So he steps inside. He finds it, _ Holy Bible _ printed in gold on the spine, and draws it from its shelf. The old man — this is his heaven, Castiel has worked out, and it seems preposterous that he could have forgotten about heavens — ignores him placidly. And he reads.

When he finishes the Bible, he moves on to Dante. Then Milton. Their ink spills messages of Hell and Heaven, righteousness and punishment, that ring comfortable and familiar: 

_ For those rebellious; here their prison ordained _  
_ In utter darkness, and their portion set, _  
_ As far removed from God and light of Heaven _  
_ As from the centre thrice to th' utmost pole. _  
_ Oh how unlike the place from whence they fell! _

From there he finds John Donne — the name sends a spike of warmth through his grace that he doesn’t understand. The words are a balm, though: _ Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run, and do run still, though still I do deplore? _

There are others he almost thinks he recognizes. Horace: _ Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori! _

That’s right, he thinks; sweet and fitting. Men die for their country, and angels for their Father. Naomi must have intended for him to find this library (he’s remembered the word library). The things he reads here guide him down a true path.

Over time, he notices the shelves’ contents change.

It’s a small thing, and subtle. One day, a new volume on one tucked-away shelf; the next, another. With time, though, the library seems almost to grow. The dates on the books are advancing, too, though the librarian never seems to read them, never even to look up from the one on his desk. That strikes Castiel as sad, somehow — to sit oblivious in this shifting universe of knowledge, of _ words. _

Some part of him feels that he must read the new texts, if the librarian can’t, and so he meets Frost and Yeats and Eliot, Housman and Millay. They tell of a new world that aches with its newness. Owen writes of war, and shocks Castiel with his critique of Horace — _ the old Lie. _ Sandburg sings of cities, and thrills him: _ the skyscraper looms in the smoke and stars and has a soul. _

Castiel would like to see a skyscraper, to watch the bustle of activity and emotion — _ of dreams and thoughts and memories _— that fills it. He promises himself that someday, when he goes to Earth again, he’ll visit Chicago.

He reads Hughes and McKay, Williams and Moore, Thomas, Bishop, Whitman, Pound. He reads Ginsberg and aches hot somewhere deep within his grace, reads Plath and feels like ice. Somewhere, he knows, poets are dying; plenty of them have their own heavens, somewhere within these halls. He won’t visit them; it wouldn’t be right. He reads Emily Dickinson and feels a queasy prickling down his wings:

_ The Poets light but Lamps - _  
_ Themselves - go out - _

Sometimes, he feels like he’s lived phantom lives. He chases dream-memories down the corridors of his mind and loses them; always, loses them.

He doesn’t tell Naomi about the library. He still doesn’t know what it means — _ why _ he’s been sent there. He’ll wait. When he’s worked out the lesson: then, he’ll be able to speak it clear.

He’s deployed before he gets the chance.

There are new protocols around vessel selection, Naomi tells him. Castiel doesn’t really remember the old protocols, but he follows his instructions. He circles Jimmy Novak for months, testing him. _ Place your hand in boiling water. Stand outside all night in the pouring rain. _

The day before he is to take his vessel, he goes to Naomi’s office. “I know you have struggled with your memories of the past, Castiel,” she tells him. She’s smiling. “Your patience is commendable. Now that you are ready to walk the earth, your history will be returned to you. Step through here, please.”

She pours it all back into him: the self he’s been straining to be. A hard-edged warrior, lightning flashing at his wings; his memories steeped in wrath and righteousness, blood and holy light. He has a thousand faces, and all of them snarling. His wings clap with thunder and boom forth the fury of God.

“Congratulations, Castiel,” says an angel he doesn’t know. He doesn’t need to know her. “You have been selected for the most glorious of missions. You are to enter Hell and rescue the Righteous Man. God has commanded it. Are you ready to take your vessel?”

He is ready.

He goes.

\---

Castiel is to command a six-angel flight. He knows some of them; Uriel gives him a nod. They are not the only flight attacking Hell. They don’t need to know how many others share their mission; their duty is to act as though it rests on their shoulders alone.

They enter Hell on a Tuesday.

It’s a long bloody battle, as they expect it to be. The mission brief is clear: _ Hell has many circles, and we don’t expect Dean Winchester to be anywhere near the top. But demons are disorganized, with agendas of their own. Prepare for many small skirmishes rather than pitched battle across entrenched lines. _

And the brief is right. Demons are annoying, of course — they know Hell far better than Castiel and his angels do, can retreat into hidden chambers and come screaming out in surprise attacks — but they’re selfish, inferior creatures. Many are too caught up in their work of tormenting souls to heed the call to battle; they spring away from their tools only when angelic grace flares blinding in their eyes. Then they fight, and die.

Castiel eyes their instruments with clinical distaste. Torture is so messy; if he ever needed information from a human brain, he could simply _ take _ it —

Something jolts rebelliously within him.

He ignores it, still staring at the meathooks, at the rusty tables littered with tools. There are knives and saws and forceps and needles, and _ needles _ —

_ Needles — _

Unprompted, a line of poetry issues from his mind. _ Through me you pass into the city of woe; __through me you pass into eternal pain._

He’s shaking. His flight is staring. 

Castiel unfurls his wings. An immense clap shakes the cavern. “Onward,” he commands, and his angels follow.

He doesn’t mention the poetry. It’s not the Bible. It’s nothing he should know, and yet it runs still through his memory: _ All hope abandon, ye who enter here. _

\---

Deeper in Hell, Castiel begins to realize how little he knows of demons.

He has thought them lazy; devoid of conviction or loyalty, incapable of fighting as an army. Now he realizes that all the demons they’ve met so far have been those too addled or apathetic to run. Hell has left them strewn about to slow their angelic attackers down — nothing more.

In the Second Circle, they lose a brother.

It doesn’t happen fast. The only way to kill an angel fast is with an angel blade, and demons can’t handle those, not without vessels to protect their raw essence from burning up on contact. So it doesn’t matter, really, that they’re outnumbered; it shouldn’t matter. All Castiel and his troops have to do is keep slashing, keep stabbing, keep smiting — kill enough that they can get through —

Only then a dozen or more of them are swarming Zephaniel. Throwing themselves on his wings, and they sizzle and scream but they don’t let go; there are more crowding his body, scrabbling at him, and _ he’s _ screaming now, too. Screaming and burning and _ flound’ring like a man in fire or lime, _ and for a moment Castiel’s frozen there as he watches — 

— watches _ the white eyes writhing in his face _ —

_ his hanging face _—

— and Zephaniel explodes.

The grace flares out of him bright and horrible, searing Castiel’s eyes. It washes the demons shrieking black against the walls, and they’re burning, disintegrating. Mere wisps of acrid smoke, insubstantial, but Zephaniel’s wings are burned dark against the walls.

He’s dead. The remainder of Castiel’s garrison is staring at him, and Zephaniel is dead.

A week later, they’re gone too.

\---

It happens — fast, or maybe slowly; he doesn’t remember later. He sees them die.

He’s not sure he’s there in the moment, either. There’s something about Hell like that; it lulls you away from yourself. Castiel blinks, and five demons are dead at his feet. Blinks again, and he’s in another corridor. His entire being aches with weariness; he’s streaked with demonic grime. He keeps on fighting, as his warriors crumble.

Uriel is the last one. He’s strong; nearly as strong as Castiel, or maybe stronger. He holds his own against the demons, emerging from every fight nearly unscratched, though Castiel never sees great piles of bodies where he’s been fighting. Perhaps he’s just been lucky; perhaps he hasn’t faced a true onslaught, a dozen or more demons at a time.

That would explain what happens.

It’s an ambush. Both of them think they’ve already cleared the level; Sariel died and took twenty demons or more with her. Castiel’s heart is a raw and aching wound. He stumbles as he moves through passageways, down corridors, barely seeing where he’s going. He led five angels down into this horror, and now only one remains —

They cut them off in a narrow passageway, Castiel on one side, Uriel on the other.

The last thing he sees of his friend is a screaming face. “Castiel, run!” Uriel howls, as the demons swarm around him; “Complete the mission! Run!”

So he runs.

There are tears streaking his vessel’s face, making tracks through the blood and filth of countless dead demons. He’s sick with it, sick and furious and he’ll never succeed; their mission was doomed from the start —

He realizes he’s been running for quite a long time, and pulls up short.

The sounds of battle are gone. The corridor is quiet and empty. A stairway opens on his left, leading down; always further down. But it’s not barricaded. There are no signs of preparation for an impending attack.

He’s made it past their defenses. Somehow, impossibly, he’s through.

Castiel sits down hard against the wall and starts to laugh.

\---

It’s some time before he recovers himself enough to go on.

He seems to be in a forgotten part of Hell, though; the floors are dusty, and he occasionally hears distant voices, but they always fade again, far off. There’s time to laugh and cry and scream, once, at the terrible loneliness he finds himself in.

He has no chance of success. He thought, once, that they might meet other angels as they narrowed in on their target; that other lines of attack might be at least as successful as their own. But there’s no one; there’s nothing. It’s just Castiel, descending into the heart of Hell, and even if he survives long enough to find the Righteous Man — even if he frees him —

He’ll still have the long, interminable, inconquerable flight out.

Maybe that’s why he makes himself invisible. He hasn’t, so far; no sense in putting off the fight. But when he creeps down that last stair, it’s as little more than a shadow on the wall.

The sounds grow louder as he goes. Screams, but also laughter; conversation. A cold shiver runs through Castiel’s grace. He’s heard of these levels, where new demons are trained, but no angel has ever seen them. He will be the first, though he won’t live to tell it.

_ Turning and turning in the widening gyre _  
_ The falcon cannot hear the falconer; _  
_ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; _  
_ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. _

He opens the door.

They’re _ people. _

Castiel knew that, somewhere, with clinical remove: that demons are souls tormented into hideous distortion. It’s different to see it in action. The queasy black ugliness of their faces beginning to infest a human’s form; the way a human lip curls with pleasure, as it digs into another’s meat —

_ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere _  
_ The ceremony of innocence is drowned — _

It’s cowardly, and he knows it, but Castiel ducks back into his stairwell.

He sinks to the floor with his back jammed against the wall, hands clutching his knees. His human knees — his vessel’s knees. Jimmy is a good man, devout and kind. Righteous, even. Would he stand up to the torments of Hell? Could he endure all this, and stay pure?

_ Surely some revelation is at hand; _  
_ Surely the Second Coming is at hand _—

The Second Coming! He doesn’t know where the poetry is coming from, but it can’t be far wrong; whoever the Righteous Man is, he must be purer even than Jimmy, stronger, more certain of purpose and noble of mind. Because if he isn’t —

_ I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked — _

Castiel shudders, and drops his head to his chest, listening to the terror through the wall. The poetry holds no answers, or none he wants to entertain.

_ The darkness drops again; but now I know _  
_ That twenty centuries of stony sleep _  
_ Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, _  
_ And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, _  
_ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? _

\---

After a time of living in dread, Castiel finds that it is all that he knows; and then he can go on.

He’s not sure how long has passed. Days or weeks or centuries, and he can hear nothing on the angelic frequencies; there’s no sign of help or relief. The Righteous Man is somewhere out there, somewhere below him, and it’s Castiel’s job to retrieve him or die trying. Whatever degraded version he might find.

And so he goes out, invisible still, into —

_ the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin, braintricked Implacability — _

Castiel comes up short, and shakes his head. If mysterious poetry is going to infest his senses like this, he can’t let it slow him down. He needs to keep moving, poetry or no poetry.

So he does, skirting high through the screams and the cracks and the reek of old blood.

Everywhere there are bodies on racks. That’s nothing new; each circle Castiel’s passed through has been racks and more racks, screams to split the Earth down to its atoms. The inventiveness of Hell runs out eventually, and he’s hardened himself to it, to the flames and the heat and the bloody chains swinging from ceilings. This, though —

These are demons in the making, and they’re more horrific than anything Castiel has ever seen.

Because they don’t go quietly — humans into demons. They go protesting with every cell in their bodies; they go _ yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars. _ They’re grinning with a knife one moment, and the next they’re shuddering and foaming bloody on the floor. Their faces flicker violently from one form to the next, and Castiel feels sick to look at it — but sicker still at the ones that go quiet, _ with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years — _

Dean Winchester’s one of the quiet ones. The Righteous Man.

There’s blood up to his elbows. He works methodically, eyes steady, and the demon-darkness is curling around his mouth.

Castiel doesn’t want to touch him. He doesn’t want to touch him and he can’t touch him, he won’t, he is nothing like this twisted soul, he would never let himself be the mindless instrument of such horror —

Dean reaches for a new knife. He bathes it in something that flickers nauseous green, luminescent, and sets its blade against his victim’s cheek.

Abruptly, that’s worse.

Castiel reaches. The very air of Hell seems to batter him back; he reaches and reaches and reaches —

— and touches Dean’s shoulder, and everything goes black.

\---

\---

It’s only for an instant. And this time he’s sure, because he opens his eyes screaming.

Dean is screaming, too. The soul he’s been torturing is screaming; the air is screaming, the world is screaming. And everything’s brighter, more horrible, terrible knowledge and sensation searing into Castiel’s grace through the flesh of Jimmy’s palm, _ now you’re really in the total animal soup of time — _

The seconds race like birds in flight. Dean is on his knees, and his agony is a physical thing, a tangible thing. His agony is Castiel. There is no line between them, nothing but pain and knife-edged regret — and Castiel understands now, understands the _ dream of life a nightmare, _ knows the darkness and the _ machinery of other skeletons _ and the _ echoes of the soul. _

He thinks, _ while you are not safe I am not safe _—

And he takes Dean, takes him _ shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light _, by his searing shoulder and by his searing soul, and _ pulls _ with all his might.

He’s not invisible any longer. There are demons swarming all around them, shouting and snarling, and when one reaches for Dean he almost reaches back, but Castiel stops him. The fire of his grace is coursing through Dean now, repelling them, and he doesn’t know if that’s something Dean can handle but he’ll have to. He’ll have to burn brilliant if he wants to get out of here, and he’ll have to _ want _ to get out of here — Castiel can’t do it without him —

He _ shoves _ his grace, one final push, and they blaze, the both of them, with all the brilliance of a star.

Images flash through Castiel’s mind. A brother he’d die for, long limbs and a mulish face; he’s five, now fifteen, now twenty. A looming father and a hazy mother, and there’s a thread, a connection, because somewhere in Dean he grips onto the white light that is Castiel’s grace and asks, more hesitation than question, — _ mom? _

Dean is wrong, but Castiel doesn’t care. He takes everything of Dean’s mother, all the humanity and goodness tied up in that blurry image framed in light, and pours it back into them — into the two of them, the burning of them, and the demons shrink back. Castiel hears the rumbling of engines and thumping of music, feels sticky leather and metal too hot to touch for long with a bare hand, but it isn’t hot like Hell; it’s something else, something good, and he takes that and pours it in too.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s resurrecting Dean; finding him inside himself, all that is good and right, and mirroring it back so bright that he can’t fail to take it in; he’s scooping him up from the darkness and they’re flying — they’re shattering the walls —

It isn’t the demons that Castiel ever needed to worry about. It’s harnessing the sheer raw power of Dean’s soul.

He catches glimpses, only glimpses, of the circles of Hell as they pass. Of _ fetid halls _ and howling faces, _ solitude, filth, ugliness; _ of demons swarming and screaming and falling back, _ twentyfive thousand mad comrades, _ helpless to slow their escape. Of — _ Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! _ Of _ the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! _

Of — _ visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! _

Of — _ Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time! _

Dean struggles in Castiel’s grip, suddenly, and Castiel knows that he loves him; has always loved him and will always love him, and they’re almost there, he just needs to restore Dean safe and alive to his grave —

So he does, building him gently, knitting flesh and bone out of the raging fuel that is Dean’s soul shot through with Castiel’s grace. They’re more than themselves, the both of them; there’s no turning them aside.

Briefly, Castiel imagines what it might be like, to claim this breathtaking human as a vessel.

The next instant, he lets the notion die.

_ I’m with you in Rockland — _

With one last surge of power, Castiel tears himself free.

When he rises above the dark earth — Dean is waking now, coughing and scrabbling — he sees that he’s blasted the trees from their roots, all around. Power rushes within him, and ebbs again. He’s still aching and filthy and more tired than he ever knew an angel could be; he’s still flush with triumph, wants to fly to the stars with it, wants to shout it across the rooftops of the world.

In the end, he lands in Chicago. He can see a long way, from here; an angel’s grace is not like a human’s eyes. He can watch a hand thrust clear of the grassy dirt, and a second, somewhere outside Pontiac, Illinois. Watch a man — it’s strange to see him this way, just a man — haul himself into the lungfuls and lungfuls of air.

He stands on a skyscraper to wait. Jimmy’s form is minuscule up here, invisible; the shadows of Castiel’s wings span the sky. They brush the street.

He is immense. He contains multitudes. Somehow he feels as though he’s always wanted to visit Chicago; always wanted to perch on this particular rooftop, with these particular seas of humans pouring in and out of the building at his feet.

Castiel watches, and waits. The angels will come for him soon. In his head, he begins to prepare his report.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems referenced in this chapter:
> 
> John Milton, "Paradise Lost"  
John Donne, "A Hymn to God the Father"  
Horace, "Carmina 3.2"  
Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"  
Carl Sandburg, "Skyscraper"  
Emily Dickinson, "The Poets light but Lamps"  
Dante Alighieri, "Inferno"  
William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"  
Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"  
Allen Ginsberg, "Kaddish"  
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"


	4. The Fish

The Righteous Man is a liar, a brawler, a thief.

Castiel watches him, over the hours and days that come, in a riot of love and despair. Jimmy Novak’s pious revulsion hums somewhere under the left corner of his ribcage: a broken window, an empty cash register, a stolen car. A magazine named _ Busty Asian Beauties _— Castiel doesn’t know what those are.

He keeps waiting for Dean to open it so he’ll understand. But Dean doesn’t; he drives the car straight, for nine hours and change. Leaves the engine running in the noisy neon of truck stops while he pumps a strange fluid — it smells of old oceans and long-deferred decay; _ gasoline, _ whisper Jimmy’s memories — into a port in the vehicle’s side. 

Finally, in the dirt driveway of a junkyard in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Dean lets the car go still.

He sits for a long moment, staring up at the run-down house. Then he slides out of his stolen car, eases the door shut so it won’t bang. He climbs the porch steps slowly, hesitates before he knocks.

The man inside wears a plaid shirt and a dirty hat. He stares like he’s seen a ghost.

Then he tries to kill Dean.

The fight wages fast, brutal, and that’s hatred on the plaid man’s face. Once, Castiel almost moves to intervene. But Dean takes the man’s knife — _ Robert Steven Singer _, he calls him — and instead of attacking in return, he rocks back in his fighting stance. He rolls up his sleeve and sucks in a breath and cuts himself, deliberately, letting the blood ooze down his skin.

His thoughts are so loud they pound in Castiel’s own mind. He’s battling not to gouge deeper. Warring with decades’ worth of instinct — of muscle memory.

With effort, he sets the knife down.

Robert Steven Singer splashes holy water in his face.

Dean blinks, slow, spitting. “I’m not a demon either, you know.”

Only Castiel, watching from five hundred miles away, can see that until this moment, he wasn’t completely sure.

\---

Castiel tries to contact him twice — exactly twice. It’s fitting, because that’s how many times Dean attempts to reach Castiel, too.

The first time, it’s horror that compels him: half Jimmy’s and half his own. The Righteous Man should not rob an empty gas station. The Righteous Man should burn with inner light, good and strong and true; he should not be limping weak and miserable from the site of his own resurrection. _ What rough beast — _

Castiel’s voice splits glass, sets TVs and radios skittering with static. It shrieks in Dean’s ears, intolerable as to a godless man.

Castiel wallows in his shock as Dean does in his sea of glass shards. He looks so beaten, there; so inconsequential. Surely Castiel can’t have been _ so _late.

The second time, Castiel seeks to offer not reprimand, but comfort.

It’s a foolish idea. But Dean has gone seeking him with the help of a psychic, and now she’s blind and Castiel is aching with regret. He’s seen more of the things inside Dean, with every hour that’s passed. The love in his eyes, the solace, when he finds his brother in a tawdry hotel. 

Castiel knows him twice over. _ The boy with the demon blood _ — dangerous. He knows him from the catalogue of Dean’s memories, too, and can see little of danger there: Dean’s Sammy is floppy-haired, headstrong, too smart for his own good. Sure of himself and his convictions in a way Dean has always envied. _ Good. _

That Sam is the most important thing in the world.

This Sam has a demon in his room.

Dean doesn’t recognize her. He only has eyes for his brother. For the first time, his wariness falters. Behind it is an ocean’s worth of love. It’s almost enough to mask the screaming misery that hides just behind the tense line of his jaw.

Maybe Dean’s trauma is too fresh upon him for angelic communication. To hear Castiel’s voice, he will need an open mind and heart. Perhaps, in a moment of quiet, with his family restored to him —

This time, Castiel brings a mirror down on Dean’s head.

\---

Uriel finds him on his rooftop. Castiel feels his presence, but doesn’t quite believe it; then he turns and sees it’s true. “Brother!” he exclaims, and pulls his missing comrade into a tight embrace.

Uriel follows his lead, motions stiff. After a moment, Castiel pulls back. “I thought you were dead.”

“And we thought you were dead,” Uriel echoes. His voice is deep and slow and sly as usual. “I made it out, Castiel, but barely. I had to assume you were lost.”

“I found him,” says Castiel, near-bursting with the news. “Saved him. Raised the Righteous Man.”

“Yes,” says Uriel slowly, “though — not in time to prevent his corruption, I see.”

The words rock Castiel back. What if his hesitation in the stairwell, what if his fears and his loneliness, were the difference between this Dean and another one, more whole?

_ He’s not corrupted, _ whispers a rebellious part of his self. _ He’s human, and he’s suffering. He is — how can you see him and not love him? _

“He will still be useful,” says Uriel, “but the powers of Heaven are disappointed. The mission was not a success. The first of the sixty-six seals has been broken, and the fight for the Apocalypse has begun."

Castiel bows his head, hot shame stinging at him. Somewhere within him, dissent echoes, a hazy memory: _ but that’s what they wanted. It’s time to bring on the Apocalypse, that’s what they said. _ He quashes it. “What must I do?”

“He has a role to play,” says Uriel, “as do you. Bring him into the fold. Tell him Heaven has work for him.”

\---

(_Uriel erred in mentioning the seals. Something happened in his mind — I’m not sure what. A doubt. _

_ Very well. I’ll take it out again.) _

\---

Castiel doesn’t know what work Heaven has for Dean, and he doesn’t need to. He only needs to serve its purpose. He needs a plan — an opportunity to introduce himself to Dean, reveal himself as an angel of the Lord.

Dean comes up with one first.

Sparks fly. Shutters bang crazily; thunder crashes. The smoke of shotgun blasts clouds the dark symbols on the barn walls.

Dean plants a knife square in Castiel’s chest. Castiel pulls it, gently, free.

His wings are great shadows in the rafters of the barn. Dean will see them, and know what Castiel is. He will know that Castiel saved him. That Castiel loves him — that God loves him. That all will be well.

Castiel smiles. He drops Robert Steven Singer carefully to the floor. He says, “I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition.”

\---

(_Not quite according to plan. Do you think —? _

_ No, let’s see how this plays out. It’s unorthodox, but it may yet work. _

_ Castiel, prepare to receive revelation._)

\---

And now they know each other. But — Dean is faithless. Dean is terrified. Dean doesn’t believe he deserves to be saved.

He asks why.

_ Why? _ Castiel doesn’t know, not really. He was merely following orders — orders that may have expired the moment Dean took up that knife. But Heaven says there is still a use for him, though they have not told Castiel anything more. “Because God commanded it,” he says. “Because we have work for you.”

His superiors teach him about the sixty-six seals. About Dean’s role in them. This time — _ this time? _ — he feels no doubt.

He does feel sorrow, and pain — on Dean’s behalf. Finally he understands the name: _ Righteous Man. _

“Read the Bible,” he tells Dean. “Angels are warriors of God. I’m a soldier.” It doesn’t make the sting of his new understanding smart any less. “The Lord works in —”

“If you say ‘mysterious ways,’ so help me,” snaps Dean, “I will kick your ass.”

Castiel isn’t sure if the spike of emotion in his chest is fondness or annoyance. He feels so many things, interacting with this human; so many more than he is equipped to handle.

(— _ hand me that spike _—)

He shouldn’t be playing games with this human. Not while his brothers and sisters are dying on the field. He certainly shouldn’t be enjoying them.

“You should show me some respect,” he counters, more quietly. They told him to use this threat; they told him to remind the human of his place. “I dragged you out of Hell. I can throw you back in.”

\---

He hates himself the moment he says it.

\---

When they send him to escort Dean into his parents’ prehistory, Castiel requests a transfer. He isn’t comfortable, he tells them. He doesn’t say: _ I’ve seen too much of his parents already. They mean too much to him. To — me. _

His request is denied. “He knows you. It has to be you. But don’t tell him too much. Whatever you do, don’t reveal the true nature of his mission — not until after it’s over.”

It’s possible that Castiel is feeling a little bit pissy when he tells Dean simply, “You have to stop it,” and disappears directly out of 1973.

\---

(_He’s begun to experience emotions. Doorways to doubt. I can suppress them, but without a full reset I’m not sure —_)

\---

They assign him to other duties for a while after that. Holding the line against Lilith and her seal-breaking campaign; it feels like trying to cup sand in human hands. Every time they stymie Lilith, she tries something new. A seal can be saved one day and lost the next, but once broken it is broken for good.

It’s the battle for the seals that leads him to Dean Winchester again. It’s also another test.

Uriel is assigned as his partner this time. Castiel _ thinks _ he is still Uriel’s superior; the chain of command is a little unclear with the rest of their flight dead. Regardless, they have the same orders: test the Righteous Man, but obey his command. Do not interfere.

Uriel nearly smites a town from the map. Castiel nearly suffers what he believes humans call a _ nervous breakdown. _

_ All of those people you saved, they'll die, _ he’d told Dean, as he battled to save his parents. _ And you don’t care? _

He knows now why he asked it. He doesn’t want to murder this town to save the world. He doesn’t want to watch Dean sacrifice an inch — not an _ inch _ — of his desperate, illogical morality, in favor of the greater good.

“I’m not like you think,” he tells Dean later, quietly. They’re sitting on a park bench; they’re watching children at play. He needs Dean to see this — he needs Dean to know. “I have questions. I have doubts.”

It’s the greatest secret he’s ever confessed. Dean looks at him like he would expect no less. Castiel doesn’t know whether to rejoice or despair. His heart sinks; his heart sings.

How do humans manage feeling this much, all the time?

\---

(_See, here, the signs of psychosis? The self-aggrandizement, the emotional attachment to humanity. His volatility concerns me. The time in Hell may have destabilized him, and he’s never been our most pliable operative. It might be wisest to pull him from the field for realignment. _

_ It can’t be done. The human has begun to trust him; we need that. We’ll make sure he doesn’t work alone. Uriel will continue to serve. _

_ If you’re sure. At least let me do a reset on his temperament controls. No, no, just a mild one, Winchester won’t notice a thing._)

\---

“You’re some heartless sons of bitches, you know that?” Dean snaps.

The situation is simple. Anna is Castiel’s former commander; Anna is a fallen angel. An abomination. She has to die.

(_Better._)

Castiel can understand how a person might feel sorrow. But sorrow is beside the point.

He tells Dean, “As a matter of fact, we are.”

\---

(_Remarkable work, Naomi. Your skills never cease to astound. _

_ What would you think of setting them to a test?_)

\---

Dean Winchester is altogether too comfortable with Castiel. Brash and presumptuous. He acts like he _ knows _ Castiel; as if the mere fact of their shared history means anything at all. The flight from Hell, the —

Castiel’s mind skates off the details. Strange words in his head; a blooming of emotion. It doesn’t matter. He was tired, then, tormented by the deaths of his brethren — worn beyond belief. Now he is whole.

If Dean truly knew Castiel, he would see that obedience is the most important value. The only value. He, too, would act without hesitation in Heaven’s name.

There are new players in the game — demons, freshly clawed free of the Pit. One has white eyes and a slithering laugh and watches Dean with a proprietary smugness that makes Castiel want to smite him right through the deepest pits of Hell and out the other side.

_ Alastair, _ Dean calls him. Castiel sees how Dean shrinks back from him. How he battles his own instincts to submit, to obey.

He’s never offered Castiel a flash of that obedience.

Castiel should want that. He does want that. A willing servant of Heaven. He also wants to tear this abomination limb from limb.

\---

(_You see the shape of it now? _

_ Sir, I don’t know if this is — _

_ Ah, ah. I have faith in your skill._)

\---

The month that follows is miserable — frenetic. They’re losing the battles for seals everywhere. Angels are dying, unexplained. Uriel’s dark humor surfaces more and more often lately. So does Castiel’s sense that he is carrying an immense weight of misery he can’t yet turn his head enough to see.

He assigns the Winchesters to Alastair’s case, yet again. The brothers win the battle for that seal, which puts their record better than most of the heavenly host. Pamela Barnes — the psychic Castiel blinded — helps them; this time, she dies for her trouble. 

But there’s another victory — an important one. This time, Castiel captures Alastair. This time, they bring him in for questioning.

Castiel builds the Devil’s trap himself. Chains Alastair to a six-pointed star. “Someone’s been killing angels,” he says, standing back to look his captive in the face.

Alastair watches him with half-lidded eyes. HIs voice is simpering, scornful; he draws it out more than any human would. “Are they, now?”

“Yes. And I want you to tell me who.”

Castiel takes two steps forward and presses his fingers to the temple of Alastair’s vessel. Alastair tips his head back and laughs.

“The _ name,_” Castiel repeats, pressing harder. He pours his grace down his fingertips — lances of fire, of pain. _ Needles? _ Alastair’s chest heaves and he rolls his head on his neck, but he doesn’t stop laughing. His mind — what glimpses Castiel can catch of it — bubbles deliriously, and then it’s an image of Castiel himself, sprawled among broken glass, wings painting a dark sweep across the pavement.

Castiel draws back, startled. Alastair is grinning. “You’ll have to try harder than that if you want _ me, _ pet.”

Clenching his jaw, Castiel steps forward again. Alastair lifts his chin. His breath is hot in Castiel’s face.

“How’s Dean?” he murmurs.

Castiel stops dead.

“He was mine, you know.” Alastair rolls his neck with a crack, a pop. “Before you took him. Has he been — satisfactory?”

Emotions Castiel can’t quite recognize are rushing around him. He wants to seize this demon by his throat.

“Of course not,” Alastair hisses. “Because he’s still mine. Just like you’re theirs.” A flick of his eyes to the heavens. “Nothing you do will ever change that, feathers.”

This time, Castiel doesn’t stop himself. Alastair’s head slams back hard against the metal, Castiel’s fingers flexing at his throat.

He could choke him out with grace in seconds. Maybe less. With his hands —

“What did you do to him?” he demands. It’s not the question he’s supposed to be asking at all.

“What did I _ do _ to him? _ Everything._” The words barely scrape past the vice of Castiel’s grip, hissing, but they’re weapons; they slice deep. “I freed him. From all that useless human morality. Made him into what he really is — and Castiel? It is _ glorious._”

“Enough.”

Castiel steps back. He realizes he’s shaking; his wings are out, and shrouding the room in night. Jimmy Novak’s heart races in his chest. Did Castiel tell it to beat?

“The demon who’s killing angels,” he says, and presses his hands to Alastair’s head once more.

This time, Alastair screams.

But it’s not the answer that flashes through Castiel’s mind — not even decoy images of burned wings. It’s something else — something worse.

It’s Dean, stretched out on the rack and screaming; Dean with Alastair bending close to his ear. Murmuring into it, then slicing, slicing — slicing it free.

Dean with no ears — with no eyes. Gaping pits in his face, mouth torn open in a scream, and — _ Oh, that’s what you want? _ says Alastair, and then, _ let’s make it easier for you. _

Dean’s throat sliced open, chin to sternum. But he’s still screaming, the raw animal noise spilling out of that cleft, and Alastair’s flaying his skin now. Slowly, lovingly — murmuring comments and compliments. _ You are ravishing like this, you know that? Positively — divine. _

Castiel lurches back, panting, and almost falls.

“Interesting,” murmurs Alastair. “Interesting, interesting. You know you — ah — exhibit human physiological responses when you get upset? The dilated pupils, the elevated pulse — oh, you would be fun to play with. I’ve never had much interest in angels, but _ you _ —”

“You will _ give _ me that name,” Castiel growls, “or I —”

“You’ll what?” smirks Alastair. “_Break _me?”

Again. The images are ready for Castiel, racing for him in a flood. He tries to push past them, to ignore the way his chest twists and his wings hitch at the images of Dean in pain — and he finds —

Tears rolling down Dean’s face, as he cuts into a woman he knew in life.

“_Interesting,_” breathes Alastair. “That bothers you _ less, _ doesn’t it? He, he hates himself for all that — for what he is inside. But _ you _ don’t. _ You _ hate when I hurt him.”

Castiel can’t go on. He doesn’t know why.

He staggers back once more, chest heaving as if under the weight of a thousand tons. He _ doesn’t know why. _ His body — his human body, his grace — feels ready to explode. He wants to break this demon down into atoms and scatter them across the universe.

He _ doesn’t know why. _

“Oh, they’ve got you good, haven’t they?”

Castiel blinks and finds Alastair’s face. He’s grinning wide with delight.

“All those emotions of yours. They’ve got you so you can’t see them at all. But they’re _ there, _ angel. They’re always there.”

Castiel doesn’t experience emotions. Emotions are human things; doorways to doubt.

“Tell me,” says Alastair, “are you breaking me, or am I breaking you?”

“Castiel.”

A voice from behind him. Castiel doesn’t need to look back to know it’s Uriel, standing there in the doorway.

“Give me — more time,” Castiel says. He can crack Alastair open. He _ will. _

“No.” The word is simple, absolute. “We have orders to bring in a specialist.”

At last, Castiel turns. “Who?”

“Dean Winchester,” says Uriel.

Alastair begins to laugh.

\---

(_Is this what you call a _test?)

\---

Dean argues. Dean shouts, and threatens, and drops acidic jokes. He tries to leave. He insists on speaking with Castiel alone.

(_It’s idiotic! It was always idiotic! You can’t send an operative this compromised into a high-pathos situation; his wiring’s primed to misfire! Sir, if I just —) _

Once Uriel is gone, Dean paces like a caged animal. He says, in a voice that hovers on the edge of nothingness: “You do not want me doing this, trust me.”

“Want it? No.” Castiel’s abruptly sick with the blind duty of it all. “But I’ve been told we need it.”

(_— I’ve told you, Naomi, the Winchester kid trusts him. We need that, if we’re going to —_)

He wants to say more, to find words to convey the horror only half-glimpsed in his own chest. But Dean’s not listening to him, not really. He’s staring through the glass at Alastair, suspended in the Devil’s trap. “You ask me to open that door and walk through it, you will not like what walks back out.”

But he’s —

He’s wrong.

Castiel has seen what lives on the other side of the door, and he has loved it. Suddenly, as if through a veil, the sharp exhilaration of that flight from Hell pierces him. His vessel’s breath catches.

(_You can _ see _ my work decaying; you can see it! There, and there —_)

His whole life has been painted in muted grays. The man standing beside him — the blue shadows on the set of his jaw, misery glittering sharp in his eyes, dark blood staining his memory — is its only spot of color. He aches with it — with the horror and the splendor that is Dean Winchester.

How had he forgotten how this felt? How had this emotion faded to a shadow of a shadow?

“For what it’s worth,” he says, and his voice comes out steady: “I would give anything not to have you do this.” The moment he says it, it’s true.

Dean nods, and swallows. In the reflection on the glass, Castiel can see his eyes close briefly. See his throat work.

_ I would give anything, _ Castiel thinks. _ I could give anything. What do I have to give? _

But Dean looks up and meets his gaze in the reflection. He says, in a colorless voice, “I’m going to need supplies.”

\---

(_And yet he’s doing his duty. You see, Naomi? No need for hysterics. I think you’ve got it from here._)

\---

Castiel conjures everything Dean asks for. The bottles and the bludgeons and the rusty knives. The holy water; the syringe. The cart and its heavy cover.

Dean looks over it, his face unreadable. Then he says, “Whiskey. Any kind. Just — something strong.”

It’s not the time to argue. Castiel complies.

Then he watches Dean walk slowly into the Hell of his nightmares.

He watches Dean do what no one should ever have to do, and learn what no one should ever have to learn. He watches him sear holy water through Alastair’s veins and eat his organs away with salt; watches him wet his knife as he once did in Hell, in the instant before Castiel saved him. Some of the time, Castiel _ can’t _ watch, but he does anyway — watches and loves Dean as if he could do it fiercely enough to keep him whole.

After it’s all over, though — once everything has gone horribly wrong and it’s Sam, not Castiel, who saves Dean’s life; once Castiel has worked out Uriel’s secret and seen him dead and opened the door to his own disobedience; once Dean’s recovering, finally, and it all should be all right — that’s when Castiel realizes he’s failed. Maybe he never had a prayer in the first place.

“Alastair was right,” says Dean. “I’m not all here. I’m not — I’m not strong enough.”

There are dark lines of dried blood, still, on his nose and over one eye. The tube full of oxygen looped under his nostrils. Castiel looks at him, and is a conflagration of wanting, things he’s always wanted but never seen clearly, things he still doesn’t understand.

“I guess I’m not the man either of our dads wanted me to be,” says Dean, and Castiel thinks: _ I will fall for this man. _

_ Sooner or later, I will fall. _

\---

Castiel figures, after that, his days are numbered.

He carries the knowledge around inside him for months. The war for the seals continues. The garrison is reorganized; Uriel replaced, along with the angels he killed. On Earth, spring arrives, with soggy weather and struggling flowers.

And Castiel flirts closer and closer with his doom. He gives Dean a smile here, offers a hint about a prophet there. “Just so you understand,” he tells Dean, danger racing in his blood, “why I can’t help.”

He expects to be discovered sooner or later. He expects to face the consequences of his disobedient thoughts. What he doesn’t expect is to uncover the truth — a new, horrifying, dizzying truth, bigger than he could ever have imagined.

His superiors aren’t trying to stop the Apocalypse at all. They’re under-equipping their forces, cutting corners at every turn. And he finally hears them talking, one day, about — Lucifer.

About Michael. About the Apocalypse. A reset; Earth made new.

They’re not trying to stop it at all. 

Anna is nowhere to be found. Time is running out. And Castiel has to tell Dean — _ he has to tell Dean. _

\---

He finds him in a dream.

Castiel has walked through Dean’s dreams before. Mostly, they’re of Hell, the blood and the knife.

Dean doesn’t like Castiel watching him sleep, though. He’s said so. And Castiel tries to respect it, but this time — this time is urgent. Castiel can’t afford to tiptoe around.

To his surprise, Dean’s not at the rack, but in a chair on a peaceful pier, fishing rod in one hand.

Castiel looks around. Why does this seem familiar? His memories are tangled: fragments of Dean’s consciousness, gleaned from their flight from the Pit, something about — his father? And other things, thoughts that swim flashing away from him, muscular and elusive. Castiel isn’t sure if they’re Dean’s memories or his own.

“We need to talk,” he says.

Dean startles, in that understated way of his; it’s half resigned. He closes his eyes for an instant. “I’m dreaming, aren’t I.”

“It’s not safe here,” agrees Castiel. His physical body is flying as he speaks, searching for a location. “Some place more private.” Ah — there. He flaps, and he’s inside a warehouse, empty and abandoned. He can ward it; keep the angels away.

He just needs to finish telling Dean first. The moment his wards are up, he’ll be cut off from the outside, too.

“More private? We’re inside my _ head,_” says Dean, as if he doesn’t know that’s one of the least safe places there is.

“Exactly. Someone could be listening.” Castiel counts the warehouse’s entrances.

Dean is looking up at him; properly, now. “Cas, what’s wrong?”

“Meet me here.” There’s a piece of paper in his pocket, and he slips it into Dean’s hand: dream hand, real hand, all the same. Is that a noise outside? “Go now.”

He blinks into his present. All is calm — quiet. He begins to work on the walls.

Angel banishing sigils come first. The warding, he’ll do after; it will weaken him, make it harder to think straight. He uses his own blood judiciously, painting on the walls.

Something’s bothering him. Something massive that he’s missing — he’s _ still _ missing something.

A memory lurks just below the surface of his mind: the journey into Hell. Something happened to him down there that he’s never understood. That’s never happened before or since. Lines of poetry blurting fully-formed out of his brain, like memories — memories that are _ his, _somehow, though he never created them —

Never that he can remember, anyway.

Something about Dean’s fishing rod gave him the same feeling. Something about that dream.

It will only take a minute to blink back into it. And it’s intelligence he might need. If he’s going to tell the Winchesters everything, he needs to _ know _ everything — everything he possibly can.

\---

The lake is as he left it, except that Dean is gone.

His tackle box and chair sit abandoned on the dock. Castiel steps out to the end of it, and looks around. The air here feels humid, the sort of heavy stillness that presages a storm.

What was Dean fishing for?

He kneels on the wooden planks, and extends one hand until his fingertips touch the water’s surface. _ Show me your face, _ he thinks, an unconscious echo of words once spoken to him.

It does, slowly, rising through the water toward his reaching hand. It presents itself in fragments: a flash of fin, a heavy jaw, one great saucer of an eye. There are broken lines trailing from its swollen lip, scars like blisters down its sides.

It’s enormous and alien, like an idea not yet grasped.

But no; it’s not so large as all that. As it looms closer to the surface, Castiel sees that it’s only a normal fish; a big one, yes, but not so big that a man couldn’t lift it. Hook it and reel it in.

It floats closer and closer. By instinct, Castiel turns his palm, and then the fish’s jaw settles into the cup of it — just the size to fit in a human hand. With his thumb he can feel embedded hooks, scarred over. The fish doesn’t seem to notice they’re there.

But Castiel still doesn’t understand. He could haul the fish out — would he know what it means then? But it seems so still, so peaceful. This dream is so peaceful — and it’s _ Dean’s. _ His one place of solace, untouched by the fires of his history.

Castiel can’t tear it apart.

Something is straining at his ears. No, deeper than his ears: something is straining at his heart. At the soul he doesn’t have. Something —

It’s a poem:

_ I caught a tremendous fish — _

There’s more to it, half-glimpsed. About hooks and jaws and gills and barnacles, eyes like isinglass that don’t return your gaze. And then:

_ I stared and stared _  
_ and victory filled up _  
_ the little rented boat, _  
_ from the pool of bilge _  
_ where oil had spread a rainbow _  
_ around the rusted engine _  
_ to the bailer rusted orange, _  
_ the sun-cracked thwarts, _  
_ the oarlocks on their strings, _  
_ the gunnels — until everything _  
_ was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! _  
_ And I let the fish go. _

Color spills around him. Knowledge turns the slow moon of its face; Castiel is — he’s — this is his —

The fish slips from his grasp, back into the water without a sound. It was never truly a fish. He stands, and he’s swaying. He says, out loud, “This has happened before.”

“So you figured it out,” says a voice behind him. He’s not in the dream. He’s in the warehouse. He turns, and he knows her: Naomi. The one with the needles — the one who always keeps him from being who he is.

“You,” he says, voice shaking, blade in his palm.

“Me,” she agrees.

\---

(_I’m not going to say I told you so._)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems referenced in this chapter:
> 
> Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish”


	5. Recursus

What next?

A string of terrible memories that nearly cripple him when he returns to himself — that make him understand, for the first time, the way nausea makes the human body rebel. He betrayed Dean, and forced him to heel, and threw him into the pit of his brother’s blood addiction and left him with no way to get out.

He killed Jimmy, or as good as. He possessed Jimmy’s daughter and almost stole her life, too.

He locked Dean in a painted cell to wait for the end of the world.

There is nothing to do but atone. To give his life for his sins, and he does — he dies defending Chuck, holding archangels off Dean’s trail —

— and God brings him back, and that’s when Castiel’s life really turns upside down.

\---

His memories from before the reset are hazy. He knows he discovered some horrible truth — about the angels’ plans, yes, but also about himself, his own history — and he knows that he is their creature, a loyal soldier, programmed and reprogrammed since the beginning of time.

He knows that almost nothing in his long life has been permanent. Histories, assignments, versions of himself. Even death didn’t last.

But this — this choice to rebel — is irrevocable, it seems.

He is cut off from Heaven. There are days when that makes him furious, at Dean and everything else. Sometimes, he feels invincible: a new god, remade in His image. Others, he knows himself to be hopelessly pathetic and small.

The Apocalypse rolls on like thunder.

Until it doesn’t, and Castiel is undying once more, and this time he knows: this brave new world is _ his. _To shape and guard it is his sacred duty. His right.

\---

So he guards Dean’s new life, lets him have his peace with the woman he loves and her son. He raises Sam from the Cage, and if that doesn’t go quite according to plan, well — Castiel supplies him with allies; his grandfather, his cousins on the Campbell side.

Castiel needs allies, too, in the war against Raphael.

He makes a deal with Crowley. A working agreement: they both need power. And Castiel might not remember everything from his long life, but he remembers how it felt to cup a single human soul inside his grace. How the blaze of its raw power rocketed him and Dean straight from the depths of Hell.

Souls are fuel, and monster souls will serve just as well as human ones. He and Crowley need merely divide the spoils.

It gets complicated, of course. The new Heaven he’s trying to create faces challenges at every turn; teaching angels free will is like teaching poetry to fish. (Why does that thought tug at him, make him want to turn and turn toward something invisible, darting away, half-glimpsed?)

Dean rebels against him too, and restores Sam’s wounded soul to his body, against Castiel’s advice. Then comes a worse rebellion, against his very cause. And Dean means the world to Castiel, he does, but he can’t let that blind him. He has to carry on. He has to believe the path he’s chosen is right.

He releases the Leviathans, and they break him. Crack him wide open.

By now, forgetting who he is feels better than remembering.

\---

There is the strange interlude of counterfeit humanity. The flash of clarity — he sees how he’s broken Dean, broken Sam, and this time he breaks on purpose, so they can be free.

There are the long months in the psych ward. He screams when they try to show him the aquarium, and doesn’t know why. He likes bees, though. And board games.

In a way, he likes being broken. It’s simpler this way.

But then comes Purgatory, and he can’t afford to be broken anymore. That’s okay; atonement is simple, too. He runs and runs to keep Dean safe, and when the time comes, Castiel shoves him free.

He’s brought back, for no reason he can name. He only learns it when he tries to kill the —

_ Tries to kill the man he loves — _

And it comes crashing in on him: the treatments, Naomi’s office. Needles and drills. This is him. This has always been him. He is not a person but a palimpsest, layers on layers of faulty commands and erasures.

So of course he gets tricked again. Of course he finds himself, lost and grieving his story, in the company of Heaven’s great storyteller — and of course Metatron feeds him a yarn. Of course Castiel, the eternal bungler, the spanner in the works, tries to save Heaven and destroys it instead. Of course Metatron hurls him graceless to Earth.

Castiel has to thank him, though. Because when he hits the ground is when all of it — all the millennia of flattened memories, every last inch of his history — the vessels and the doubts and the stories and the poems and the fish — _ Castiel, _himself, inviolate, a whole being, if now as remote as the stars that fall around him — at last, at long last, comes rushing back.


	6. Shake Hands

New memories press on Castiel from all sides. They snatch at him, insistent: _ remember Martha Dickinson? Remember the librarian’s heaven? Remember the Scythian? Remember how it felt, how it _ really _ felt, when you pulled Dean from Hell? _

It’s a while, though, before he can afford to listen.

First he has to run, and keep himself safe. He wants to help the other angels, too — this is his fault, after all — but he learns the hard way that he has to be cautious.

He has to learn how to wash himself, feed himself, keep himself moving. The demands of his body’s metabolic budget: what it feels like when he needs to sleep, and how long he can keep going without it. The difference between a belly clenched from hunger and from guilt.

There is hardship in it, but joy, too. And Castiel begins rationing his memories like he rations his food. He pulls them out one at a time, and lets them glow and pound and resonate through his ribcage: everything is _ so much _ when you’re human! Forgotten memories or familiar ones, it doesn’t matter: each one is as rich and heady as the next.

He doesn’t go easy on himself. He samples his shames and failures alongside his joys. Tastes all over the horror of Dean, bloody and pleading on his knees in Lucifer’s crypt. Dean ordering a psychopath’s array of torture tools directly from Castiel’s brain, and walking with them into a room he dreads. Dean dying. Dean watching Castiel with sick betrayal in his eyes.

But there are other memories, too —

These ones are even more precious. The look on Dean’s face when he found Castiel by the river in Purgatory. His laughter in an alleyway on a night they both planned to die. Dean sitting Castiel down with a Zeppelin tape: _ Listen — just listen. _ Dean’s pride, showing Castiel around the bunker, the first time.

Sometimes, he seines through his mind not for his own memories, but for foreign ones — memories that ran through him like rivers when he made himself a valley to hold Dean’s soul. Working on the Impala. Setting off fireworks with a miniature Sam. Fishing with his father, at a lake Castiel recognizes.

He’s been there, once, in a dream.

It takes discipline, but Castiel picks memories that aren’t of Dean, too. His vessels and their histories; millennia of his own missions. Poems, plucked like gleaming gold threads from the tapestry in his mind.

He doesn’t chase the love poems; those tend to greet him by accident. But they build something inside him, as he travels: a map. A body of evidence.

He has the first two words ready by the time Dean and Sam pick him up. He travels over them, again and again, the whole drive back to the bunker. _ I want — I want — _

It’s in the shower that he puts it together. He’s seen that Dean loves this place, but now he understands it: a refuge from all the fear and instability that is life while human. A _ home. _

That’s how Dean feels. Like home.

The words are simple enough. He floats on a buoy of confidence as he readies himself to say them. And Dean finds him alone in the library; Dean looks at Castiel like he means it and says: “Cas, uh — can we talk?”

“Of course.” _ I want — you. _ Castiel pulls out a chair for Dean. “You know I always appreciate our talks. Our time together.” _ I want you. I want you. _

But Dean doesn’t take the offered chair. He sits on the table, instead, and there’s something screwed-up and queasy about the muscles in his face.

“Listen, buddy,” he says. “You can’t stay.”

\---

So Castiel goes.

He turns down the offered money — most of it — and the offered car. He knows Dean can see he’s upset, and he knows Dean’s upset, too, hovering and glowering and looking sick with guilt by turns. Castiel hates it. He’s furious at himself for putting that look on Dean’s face; he’s furious at Dean for choosing this.

Castiel could be useful. He’s not totally incompetent, as hunters go.

But that’s a stupid thing to think, because of course, without his grace, he _ is. _

Castiel has some experience with riding Greyhound buses. They’re far more interminable when he can’t wink out to another location the moment he chooses. He rides them until he can’t stand it anymore, and then gets off in a town named Rexford, Idaho.

Dean has texted him five times asking how he is. Where he is, if he’s getting set up. If he’s staying safe, using his wardings. Castiel types back, deliberately blunt: _ I am well. _

Rexford’s too small a town for a homeless shelter, but there’s a nice tree-lined park by the river, behind the lot where the semi trucks stop for the night. It has benches and tables and even a picnic shelter with a roof, and Castiel acquires a sleeping bag and spends a few nights there, quite comfortably.

The nearby Gas ‘n’ Sip is where all the truckers go for their coffee and their showers and their laundry, so Castiel starts following suit. He likes the shower there. It’s clean and hot, with excellent water pressure, almost as good as the bunker’s. It helps him look neat and presentable; Dean told him, before he left, that that’s important for things like finding a job.

Unfortunately, something he _ doesn’t _ know enough about is how one actually finds a job. So it’s pure luck that, after a week or so of visiting the Gas ‘n’ Sip, he starts to feel familiar with its rhythms and its systems; it’s pure luck that he walks in one day on a screaming fight between one of the employees and Nora, the proprietor. Nora is in tears; the man is throwing things.

So Castiel picks him up and puts him outside. Then he locks the door and helps Nora reshelve all the scattered merchandise.

“Thank you,” she keeps saying. She’s still crying. “Good help is so hard to get, around here — all the young ones want to leave and then the ones that stick around are already so angry — I think about the kind of life I’m making for my baby…” She scrubs a hand over her face. “I just wish I could have one employee like you. Just one. _ God. _”

God’s not very likely to help her here, but Castiel does see the irony when he answers, mildly, “Well, I _ am _ looking for work.”

\---

With work comes a safer place to roll out his sleeping bag — the storage room is clean and dry. He can use the shower anytime he likes now, and do laundry and brush his teeth; after they lock up for the night, the Gas ‘n’ Sip is his. He loves it. For the first time in his human life, he begins to sleep through the night.

With sleep come the dreams.

Castiel has never really understood dreaming. It has usually seemed like a convenient thing that humans do — enter a pliable state of consciousness that Castiel can bend to his purposes. Occasionally it’s seemed terrifying, because if he can infiltrate dreams, other angels can too.

Until now, though, he’s never encountered a dream he can’t control.

They start out fragmentary. They’re nightmares, sometimes — a thousand Deans dead on a warehouse floor. Others, they leap from place to place and thought to thought, with no logic at all. But sometimes, he goes back to the fishing pond. The one where he spoke to Dean, so many years ago.

The dream goes like this:

Castiel can’t find Dean. He’s running; branches tear at his clothes. He knows that Dean must be near here, somewhere — Dean is in the place that is safe. Clear sky and gentle water, slap-slapping on the dock.

He bursts out of the trees. There is the dock, but it’s empty: the chair and tackle box sit there, always, as if Dean just left. Castiel’s steps _ thunk-thunk _ as he crosses the planks and stands on the dock’s end.

There are fish in the water, strange fish with human heads. They look like dead things, pale and distorted, but when they rise to the surface, they wear Castiel’s face. Jimmy Novak’s face, really, which fits, because he’s dead too.

When they speak, their voices are a mocking drone. He covers his ears, but he can’t shut them out. They borrow poets’ words:

_ He would not stay for me, and who can wonder? _  
_ He would not stay for me to stand and gaze. _  
_ I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder, _  
_ And went with half my life about my ways. _

\---

Castiel wakes up cross. Maybe the object of Housman’s desire refused to stay; at least he didn’t kick the poet out. Alone and unwanted.

He does not think about the half dozen texts he’s ignoring — Dean, trying to check in.

Instead he pours himself into his work. It’s not glamorous, he knows, but he does it well. He looks after the store; he _ cares. _ He talks with patrons, about the weather, about the news —

— and that’s how he finds the case.

He spends several days angry about it. Another trying to convince himself he should work it alone. Then he gives in, and calls Dean. 

“Hello to you too, Cas. How are you?” asks Dean.

He sounds hurt, which is ridiculous, so Castiel ignores it. Nora’s asked him to clean the slushie machine; he props his phone on his shoulder as he works on opening it up. “I am busy.” Without pausing, he relays the details of the case.

This time there’s a touch more humor in Dean’s voice. “All right, so how do you want to do this? You want to meet up at the latest scene? Want me to pick you up?”

He’s forgotten to drain the machine. Electric blue liquid spills across the floor, his hands, his shoes. _ What part of busy do you not understand? _ Castiel almost snaps.

Instead, he manages, more smoothly: “I’ve got my hands full over here. Just thought you would want to know about the case.”

There.

He hangs up. The mess of slushie on the floor stares back at him. He sighs, resigned, and goes to get his mop.

\---

That night, the dream-fish taunt him:

_ Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all's over; _  
_ I only vex you the more I try. _  
_ All's wrong that ever I've done or said, _  
_ And nought to help it in this dull head: _  
_ Shake hands, here's luck, good-bye. _

_ But if you come to a road where danger _  
_ Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share, _  
_ Be good to the lad that loves you true _  
_ And the soul that was born to die for you, _  
_ And whistle and I'll be there. _

Castiel sits up in his sleeping bag. The Exit light glows inexorably red, as usual. _ Well, I _ won’t _ be there, _ Castiel vows to himself. _ He doesn’t need me; then he doesn’t need me. I’ll let him do this on his own. _

But of course Dean shows up at the gas station anyway, grinning like an idiot, and of course Castiel’s chest balloons three sizes at the sight.

Of course he can’t find it in himself to turn Dean away.

\---

So, if he’s not going to ignore Dean forever, he needs a new plan. Fortunately, Nora asks him out right on time.

Or Castiel thinks she does.

It’s almost more than he’s prepared to handle, Dean looking him over with an approving eye. “Always open the door for her,” he advises. “Ask a lot of questions. They like that.” And then: “Go get ‘em, tiger,” with a hand clapped bracingly against Castiel’s chest.

_ I want you, _ Castiel thinks. The words are still right there, ready for him. Still just as true.

As it turns out, Nora never meant to ask him out at all. He’s been retained as a babysitter.

That duty turns into an all-out fight for his life, when Ephraim the Rit Zien shows up at his front door. By the time Dean comes to his rescue, Castiel has a sprained wrist — so strange, the fragility of human bodies, he thinks as pain throbs through it — and an existential crisis that’s literally trying to kill him.

They don’t let it. Dean has a solution for the baby’s fever, too, tossing an offhand story about Sam’s childhood illnesses over one shoulder as he rocks her in his arms. When she quiets, he returns her to Castiel. For a moment they’re close like that, arms cradling arms, heads tipped together so that Castiel’s hair brushes Dean’s cheek.

_ I want you, _ thinks Castiel, familiar, and that’s how he discovers another version of the words.

It’s the same but it’s different, because it asks nothing, merely offers: _ I love you. _ And he’s thought it before, but never from the roots of his heart like this. Never with this letting-go.

The next day, he watches Dean drive away, and starts to think about what he can do for the angels.

\---

That night, settling into his sleeping bag, Castiel draws out a memory again, slow and careful, for the first time since he got to Rexford.

It’s just a simple one. One of the many slow wondering falling-in-loves written across his mind’s history. It’s the second time he and Dean ever spoke face-to-face — if the inside of Dean’s dream counts as a face to face: Castiel, leaning against a counter in a dream of Bobby’s kitchen. He’d been annoyed at the time, agitated. And Dean had been combative, like he always was back then — _ back then? _ Castiel teases himself with a smile — but it had slipped, briefly; his curiosity getting the better of him.

It was the day Castiel told Dean about the breaking of the seals. Not that Dean himself had been the first one; Castiel didn’t know that either, at the time. But the rest of it.

_ Okay, _ Dean had said, _ I’m guessing that’s not a show at Sea World. _

It’s taken Castiel years to get the joke. But there was something about Sea World on the news today, and now he can picture it: sixty-six seals, all balancing balls on their noses in a demonic pentagram. The image makes him huff out a little laugh, already half-asleep.

At the pond, the dream-fish are singing:

_ The half-moon westers low, my love, _  
_ And the wind brings up the rain; _  
_ And wide apart lie we, my love, _  
_ And seas between the twain. _

_ I know not if it rains, my love, _  
_ In the land where you do lie; _  
_ And oh, so sound you sleep, my love, _  
_ You know no more than I. _

Castiel rolls over in his sleeping bag, and smiles.

\---

Eventually, the time comes to leave Rexford.

Nora has been acting strangely. She’ll come and sit close to Castiel, leaning back in a way that flatters her slender body, laughing and tilting her head; then she’ll study the parade of humanity that flows through her door and ask him, _ Do you think that one’s hot? What about him? What about her? _

Castiel is confused. He doesn’t think Nora is bisexual; she always wrinkles her nose in distaste when she asks him about women, but she waits for his answer just as avidly every time. Castiel struggles to evaluate the metric she seems to be looking for. Every person who walks through the door is _ not-Dean, _ and that’s the only scale that begins to make sense in his mind.

“He’s nice enough-looking,” she says, disdainfully, of one trucker, “but I bet he’d take you on a date and sweep you off your feet, then roll on out of town and not call you for a month. Like that friend of yours, from last week.”

He considers this. “Dean says his dates usually end when he runs out of singles.”

Nora lets out a high, choppy bark of a laugh. “See? That’s what I’m talking about. _ Men._”

Castiel is mystified.

The trucker in question turns out to be a great help, though. Because later that day, there’s a story on the news: _ Motorcycle Murders. _A dozen or more deaths in a born-again biker gang, at a tiny bar in a tiny town in Wyoming. In a grainy photograph, Castiel thinks he recognizes the sooty imprints of a dead angel’s wings.

The roll-on-out-of-town trucker is about to roll on out of town, and he’s headed toward Wyoming. Nora’s already gone home for the evening. With regret, Castiel takes off his vest, folds it neatly, and sets his nametag on top. He writes a note: _ Nora — I’m sorry I have to leave like this. Jason is giving me a ride. Please accept my best wishes in your search for a mate. _

The trucker named Jason seems to think everything Castiel says is uproariously funny. He stops with Castiel at the discount mall in Rock Springs and helps him pick out a cheap suit, then watches as Castiel carefully counts out his cash. “What’s this all for?” he asks, around his chewing gum. “Going to see a girl or somethin’?”

“I need to pretend to be an FBI agent,” Castiel answers, honestly, and Jason throws his head back and laughs.

He frowns a little when he drops Castiel off on the side of the road a quarter mile short of the bar, but Castiel waves cheerfully until the truck rumbles away. Then he goes to investigate the scene of the crime.

A few hours later, Dean and Sam are there. Castiel should have anticipated that; of course they would be monitoring the same news stories he is. Maybe he hoped for it, in some corner of his heart. For one brief shining moment, he thinks they’ll work the case together. Like they did in Rexford, like they did before he fell.

Then Dean tells him to leave again.

Castiel walks down the side of the highway, furious with himself. He shouldn’t have presumed; he should have known this was a bad idea. It’s miles before he gives in and hitches a ride to the nearest town. A cheap motel.

He pays for a room, and leaves the door unlocked. It’s time to stop skirting around what needs to be done. It’s time to meet with an angel. Reveal himself.

Castiel kneels by the side of the bed, and starts to pray.

\---

Only a few days later, Dean calls him home.

Much has happened in those days, though — too much. Castiel is carrying stolen grace in his veins, and it burns at him like the fever did at Nora’s baby, cruel and complete. Humanity etherizes, emotion blunted into air. The oxygen itself tastes dead and infinite, millions of molecules that add up to nothing at all.

And that’s the least of it. The prophet Kevin Tran is dead, killed by a deceitful angel. Sam is missing, possessed and unaware. Dean is tearing apart the bunker, the first real home he’s ever known; Dean is looking at Castiel like he’s the only good thing in the world.

Castiel thinks of Sam: of the strange young man with the demon blood he’s come to know and love. Who comes back from every unfathomable horror with a truer heart and more miserable eyes. Of the Sam who lives in Dean’s memories and architects the shape of Dean’s heart.

He doesn’t want to be the only good thing in Dean’s world.

“Listen to me,” he says, “Sam is strong. If he knew an angel was possessing him, he could fight. He could cast the angel out.”

Dean looks at him with a terrible hope. And they begin to make a plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems quoted in this chapter include:
> 
> A.E. Housman, "He would not stay for me, and who can wonder"  
A.E. Housman, "Shake hands, we shall never be friends"  
A.E. Housman, "The half-moon westers low, my love"


	7. Into That World Inverted

The plan works — eventually, in a way. Sam is back, and hurting, body and soul. For the first time, he looks at Dean and Castiel sees that he can’t forgive him. He won’t.

So Dean goes, and Castiel stays, to care for the greater half of Dean’s heart.

Later, he learns what comes of it. Later than he should, because he’s distracted, again: by Metatron, Bartholomew, the factions of warring angels. The prospect of a living Gabriel, offered and then yanked away. Capture, at the hands of Metatron.

Metatron has a lot to say, most of it about stories. “You have been around since scaly things crawled out of the muck,” he snaps. _ You make them sound ugly, _ Castiel thinks. _ But they weren’t; they were beautiful. _ “Would it have killed you to pick up a book, watch a movie?”

Castiel thinks of scrolls and manuscripts and circulars, a little heavenly library crowded with traitorous tomes. He keeps his mouth shut.

So Metatron pumps his head full: novels, movies, TV shows. Everything he’s consumed in the last couple of millennia, he says; it sears for a moment, shoving in, and an animal part of Castiel wants to scream: _ no please don’t we’re done, my brain is supposed to be _ mine _ now and you can’t, not again — _

But his brain is still his own, if crowded with useless knowledge. Dean might like it. Castiel tests it, briefly, running down threads; but he doesn’t find the albums of Led Zeppelin. He does find Star Wars. He doesn’t find Busty Asian Beauties.

Castiel doesn’t need Metatron’s download to know the story that matters most, when he finally sees Dean again. He’s carrying something with him. It’s dark and slippery and twisting, and Castiel’s never encountered it in person before, but the words that go with it are as old as Metatron himself: _ a fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth. _

“What have you done?” he demands, seizing Dean’s wrist, shoving his sleeve to the elbow. The Mark is there, bright and gaping, a knot of greed and despair. “Damn it, Dean!”

Dean pulls roughly back, face shuttering. He stomps away to the Impala, and Sam follows with a helpless shrug.

Castiel watches them go, and stands there for long minutes after the trail of their exhaust has vanished into the night air.

\---

Castiel doesn’t sleep, anymore, as an angel; he doesn’t dream. But that night, he chases a memory.

It’s not hard to find. He supposes he’s been here often enough. The sky over the lake is steel gray, and the water moves restlessly, hungry for this shore, now that. The dock is bare, and Castiel walks out to stand on it alone, trench coat flapping in the fickle breeze.

_ Dean, _ he thinks, _ where are you, _ but he can’t quite walk through dreams like he used to, now that he has no wings.

He saw something tonight that scared him. Something of the torturer, bound in chains of his own self-loathing, flinging it with razor blades across the walls. He thinks again, for the first time in years, _ what rough beast — _

The lake ripples, and answers.

The thing rearing out of it is as silver-gray as the water, as the sky. Rivulets stream from its sides as it grows, keeps on growing, teeth gaping, gills gasping, a desperate many-slashed maw. Its forehead rises bulbous, tiny deep-sea eyes blinking against the amorphous light, and it keeps growing: growing and growing, to the scale of Castiel’s fears.

It’s the size of the basin itself, rearing high above him, the water sloshing at its flanks, when Castiel says: “Stop.”

A terrible sorrow has pierced him. He has no business calling this creature forth; its life is not his to command. If he fears it, that is only because he has forced it to grow, hauled it to air it never wished to taste.

It gasps and shudders in the cruel atmosphere. “Please,” says Castiel, and: “I’m sorry. You don’t have to do this. Go home.”

He never forced Dean to take the Mark, any more than he sent Dean to Hell. But he thinks, as he watches the great sea monster wallow away, shrinking homeward, that he never really dreaded any beast; only the vicious horrors the world comes to visit on his best friend.

\---

In the months and years that follow, Castiel visits the fishing dream often. He doesn’t find Dean there. But he does find solace, in all its improbable forms.

Bass moving lazily below the water’s surface, shadows among the plants that wave gently from the muck. Minnows darting, and when Castiel catches them in his hands, they aren’t merely silver — streaks of orange and black mark their scales, hieroglyphic. He finds a river that runs into the lake — or maybe he invents it — and there are trout there, wavering in the deep rocky pools, still in the face of the current. There are tiny fish with brilliant green and gold scales that tuck themselves in crevices on the bottom; there are fish with black streaks down their sides that carry pebbles in their mouths, one by one, to build mounds the size of a truck tire.

Eventually, Castiel can’t help but invent more.

He conjures another river, a mightier one, that carves down through basalt canyons and towering firs to a fog-shrouded sea. He puts salmon as long as his leg in it, and watches bears come down from the trees to catch them. He wanders the shore to find sea stars, barnacles, tiny fish stranded in tide pools. Crabs scuttle across the sand between the rocks. An octopus considers him and retreats into the ocean’s depths.

Another day, he steps onto the dock and the lake is the sea: wide and simmering blue, white sand spilling from its shores. He builds coral reefs. He watches clownfish hide among anemones.

Yet another, he builds the Baltic: straight from the mind of a Swedish poet. He spreads it wide and silver and island-mazed across the horizon. He touches the water’s surface and summons the sort of sculpin they call a bullhead — _ the fish that’s a toad who wanted to be a butterfly and made it a third of the way. _ He bedecks the sea with bladderwrack: _ In the clear water the seaweed-forests shine, they’re young, you want to emigrate there, lie stretched out on your reflection and sink to a certain depth — the seaweed that holds itself up with air bubbles, like we hold ourselves up with ideas. _

The angels have challenged him, and abandoned him. He has chosen Dean, like he’ll always choose Dean, for all that he feels Dean slipping away from him more and more every day. For all that his stolen grace gutters in his chest.

He fills the bay with jellyfish: _ they drift like flowers after a sea burial, if you take them out of the water their entire form disappears, like when an unspeakable truth is lifted out of the silence and expressed as lifeless gel, yes, they’re untranslatable, they must stay in their own element. _

Humanity never ceases to amaze him. Untranslatable, the poet declares, and yet he can translate it all, every helpless wonder and emotion that swells in Castiel’s chest. He quotes, aloud, to the bullhead: “_On the lee side you can hear the grass growing: a faint drumming from below, the faint rumbling of a million small gas flames, that’s how it is to hear the grass grow._”

It’s true. That’s how it is to hear the grass grow. As an angel, he’s always known it; as a human, he was all but deaf. But filled with wonder, too, for what little sliver of the world he could perceive — and for what he remembered.

“I wonder how he knows,” Castiel murmurs, but the fish, of course, doesn’t answer.

\---

Dean goes missing, and Castiel nearly dies.

The foreign grace within him is more toxic the more it dwindles. He sweats and shakes and can barely reach the world of dreams; he’s left instead with his waking fears and regrets, his useless not-quite-human body. Hannah comes to find him, and he does his best to hide it from her, and fails; he tries to hide it from Sam and fails there, too. The self-knowledge that a year ago felt like a blessing is now a crippling weight: he has done so much ill, made so many mistakes, and he has so little time left to correct them.

And Dean —

It’s when he’s with Hannah that Castiel gets the call from Sam. “You need to get to Beulah, North Dakota. Now.”

“I do?” Castiel echoes.

“Yes.” Sam’s talking fast, breathing heavy. “Crowley and Dean were there. We’ve got to pick up their trail.”

Castiel blinks for a moment, thrown by the good news. “Good,” he says, hope gasping inside him. “Great.”

“Yeah, um — not so much,” says Sam. “Cas — Dean’s a demon.”

\---

He’s useless, though. He can’t heal himself; can scarcely stay awake, can scarcely fight. He dozes off behind the Lincoln’s wheel and puts her in a ditch; Dean would be ashamed of him. If he weren’t a demon. If he felt shame, anymore.

The howling loss simmers somewhere inside him. Mostly, Castiel doesn’t touch it. But he sleeps, and so he dreams.

The lake is teeming, but he can never quite get a glimpse at the creatures that break the surface and disappear again. Their splashes crack sharp across the water. Viewed from the dock, it seems to boil.

Castiel turns, and there are words carved into the tree behind him, dripping sap dark as blood. They’re in another language, but Castiel understands: _ Oh, the magnificence of hell! _

He shudders.

Dean is a demon, and that means he’s retreated into what is simple — what is easy. It means he’s taken that final step he never did, all those years ago, when Castiel pulled him from the Pit.

_ In hell no one has drunk and no one has slept _  
_ and no one rests and no one sits still. _  
_ In hell no one speaks but everyone screams, _  
_ there, tears are not tears and all grief is powerless. _

Being a demon isn’t so different from being an angel, Castiel thinks. Angels have no souls, and demons carve out theirs. Kill them with salt and with fire.

But demons may be curable. Sam can do it, if anyone can.

Castiel wakes and sleeps and wakes and sleeps; his grace is barely there. He sleeps, and wonders if it’s death, this time, tugging at the edges of his vision. He doesn’t want it to be. He wants to see Dean, just one more time, and tell him he’s sorry —

“Cas,” says Sam, on the phone, “I might be killing him.”

Maybe he is; either way, Sam is Dean’s best hope. And Castiel needs to get there. He just needs to get there, for all the good it will do.

But they’re ambushed at a gas station. Castiel’s weak, too weak; he can’t save himself. He can’t save Hannah. He lies on the blurry grass and thinks, _ so this is dying — _

He’s never done it slowly enough to appreciate it before.

Gleaming boots in his vision: a black suit. “Hey, champ,” says Crowley.

\---

Another stolen grace; another lease on life. He can’t regret it, not when it saves Sam’s life, Dean’s soul.

He carves the lakeshore into steep cliffs, adorns them with mussels and barnacles and anemones, sets fish he can’t name lurking in their hollows. He reads them Marianne Moore:

_ All _  
_ external _  
_ marks of abuse are present on this _  
_ defiant edifice— _  
_ all the physical features of _

_ ac- _  
_ cident—lack _  
_ of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and _  
_ hatchet strokes, these things stand _  
_ out on it; the chasm-side is _

_ dead. _  
_ Repeated _  
_ evidence has proved that it can live _  
_ on what can not revive _  
_ its youth. The sea grows old in it. _

Hannah relinquishes her vessel — a choice that looks to Castiel like humanity. Like love.

And he finds himself thinking about Jimmy Novak. The man Castiel killed, and the family he left behind. The daughter he possessed, once, in the depths of one of Naomi’s many rewirings — does that absolve him from sin?

He finds Claire living in a group home, with a missing mother and a manipulative criminal for her only semblance of family in the world. He helps her, or tries, and learns in the process that Dean is not okay. Dean is struggling more with the Mark’s sway than ever. Dean is almost as far from okay as he’s ever been.

But Dean fights, and Claire fights, and neither of them is lost, not yet. Dean kills Cain and walks away still human. He presses the First Blade into Castiel’s palm, and the touch of his blood-stained fingertips feels like a prayer, or maybe a benediction. They find Amelia Novak and can’t save her, but there’s something lighter in Claire afterward — a little more free.

And Castiel gets his grace back: his _ own _ grace, that he hasn’t felt since the fall. He fears, for a moment, that with it will come all the faulty wiring, the erasures and deceptions — but he drinks it in and feels like himself. More like himself than he’s felt since he had no grace at all.

He visits the lake a few nights later. He fills it with flying fish, and reads to them as they leap and dance. He thinks about Claire, and about Dean, and about himself:

“_Inside the enormous Romanesque church, tourists crammed into the half-darkness. _  
_ Vault opening behind vault and no view of the whole. _  
_ Several candle flames flickered. _  
_ An angel without a face embraced me _  
_ and whispered through my whole body: _  
_ ‘Don’t feel ashamed that you’re human, be proud! _  
_ Inside you, vault behind vault opens endlessly. _  
_ You’ll never be complete, and that’s how it should be.’” _

Castiel wonders if the poet spoke truly — if a wayward angel ever tried to show him the wonder of his own humanity. Perhaps it’s only an imagining, that wonder at work.

Once, Castiel thought any angel was more immense — contained more universes — than a human could ever imagine. Now he’s not sure it isn’t the other way around.

\---

There are times, in those last desperate months of the spring, when all seems well. Dean laughs and grins and spends time in the bunker’s kitchen, cooking. He reads books in armchairs and stays mostly away from the whiskey and smiles at Castiel, warm and deliberate, a smile that starts at his lips and climbs to crinkle the corners of his eyes. Once, when Castiel finds him listening to music in his bedroom, his face twitches from blank to bright within a heartbeat’s notice. He beckons Castiel closer, and levers the enormous headphones over his skull — “Listen. Just listen to this.”

It’s loud and rollicking. Castiel listens, and thinks there might be poetry in the lyrics, but he can’t quite catch what they say.

Sam is a steady hand on the tiller: they _ will _ find a cure, the Book of the Damned will prove fruitful, they’ll get there soon. Dean doesn’t know, and that makes Castiel uneasy.

Not uneasy enough to tell him, though. That guilt will always weigh on his shoulders.

And he fails to stop it, when the Styne family comes. He fails to keep Charlie safe. They leave her body crumpled in a bathtub, and he thinks of the look on her face when she first met him — _ Did we just become best friends? _

“Dean’s gone after them,” says Sam, and: “I've been the one out there, messed up and scared. And alone. And Dean —”

“Did whatever he could to save you,” Castiel finishes, quiet.

“Go,” says Sam. “Find him, Cas. Keep him safe.”

Castiel goes. And of course he fails at that too.

\---

After the fight —

_ Blood in his eyes, his nose. Dean’s face, cold in its fury. Dean’s shirt stained with blood Dean’s knuckles stained with blood Dean’s gaze stained with blood — _

After the fight, Castiel lies among books, the smell of gasoline filling his senses.

_ Dean’s fist, slamming into his jaw. Dean’s knee in his gut, Dean’s skull fracturing his nose. Dean flinging him into tables, onto the floor. _

After the fight, Castiel lies among books, the smell of gasoline filling his senses. The ceiling swims above him, and he’s alive.

_ Dean’s voice, remote and absolute. I took down a monster, because that’s what I do. _

After the fight —

_ Dean’s grip strangely gentle on Castiel’s wrist, like he knows he’s already won. Turning it, freeing his blade. _

After the fight, Castiel lies among books, the smell of gasoline filling his senses. The ceiling swims above him, and he’s alive. He turns his head to see the agent of his destruction: his own blade, plunged through the heart of a book. For a moment, he’s so dizzy that his skull could be two places at once. Here, and whole; there, a fractured shell around that metal certainty.

_ Dean’s face, a flicker of sorrow. Dean’s blade, descending. _

After the fight, Castiel lies among books, and dreams.

\---

The lake is red and lifeless, the autumn trees bare. Castiel lies on the dock for long minutes before he realizes he can sit up.

He can sit up, and so he can change other things, too. His capacities are not beyond him here as they are on Earth; his grief is not so great it cannot be surmounted. Dean is not unreachable. Everything he loves is not lost.

He spreads his hands, and the lake clears. It is not blood but water, starry blue and rippling in the breeze. Another gesture, and that breeze rustles with greenery: oaks, maples, a birdsong netted by twigs.

But he can’t quite bear the gaze of that adamant sun. He bows his head, and cools the day to night; the moon looms large and glowing, a platterfull reflection on the lake.

There are so many poems about the moon. Castiel picks one, and finds that it is also a poem about his heart.

_ By the Universe deserted, _  
_ she'd tell it to go to hell, _  
_ and she'd find a body of water, _  
_ or a mirror, on which to dwell. _  
_ So wrap up care in a cobweb _  
_ and drop it down the well _

_ into that world inverted _  
_ where left is always right, _  
_ where the shadows are really the body, _  
_ where we stay awake all night, _  
_ where the heavens are shallow as the sea _  
_ is now deep, and you love me. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems quoted in this chapter:
> 
> Tomas Tranströmer, "Baltics"  
Edith Södergran, "Hell"  
Marianne Moore, "The Fish"  
Tomas Tranströmer, "Romanesque Arches"  
Elizabeth Bishop, "Insomnia"


	8. Among Eagles

Sam succeeds in his mission: the Mark removed, Dean saved. But Castiel is not there to see it. Rowena bespells him and escapes with the Book of the Damned, and then he’s deep in the throes of a bloodlust of his own — wild and snarling, his mind snatched from him again as it has been so often before.

He does his best to manage it. Not to kill anyone he doesn’t intend to. He prays to Heaven. He calls Dean, and apologizes — _ it may be some time before we see one another again. _

Later, when his prayers are answered, he wishes he’d been able to say more. That he could locate the words that match his strange species of a heart; that Dean could _ know _ Castiel is thinking of him, dreaming of him, whatever may come. But as Efram carves at his body, at his grace — the blade slides in and out of flesh almost lovingly, drinking in whatever it can touch — he can only think: _ so stupid, so stupid, you’ve fucked up once again. _

And then, with a crown of needles clamped once more to his skull —

It only lasts a few minutes. Only a few minutes, but in his mind it stretches far longer, spinning again and again in gruesome color: the fight, three angels dead. The point piercing his brain, less painful than _ present, _ insistent, reordering everything around it, making itself known.

If they try to make him kill Dean again —

But no; he’s free, he’s free. He walks and staggers and can’t stop seeing horrors in his mind. It’s all so fresh: all of it, the years, the _ centuries. _ He can’t believe he ever survived like that. He can’t believe he ever tore himself free.

_ Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark — _

Heaven is just as dangerous, just as corrupt, as it’s always been. _ Where thoughts are built with emergency exits. _ Castiel should have known better than to trust them. Even Hannah betrayed him; none of them see him as a brother.

_ I fell asleep among the swallows, and woke up among eagles. _

But what if this is Rowena’s spell talking? Corrupting him in one direction, while the angels try to corrupt him in another. He is such a wretched, deludable thing.

Step follows step, barely. He staggers blindly in the direction his body wants to go, and maybe he knows it’s toward the bunker; toward Lebanon; toward Dean. Maybe he doesn’t. His mind is half-dreaming, building that familiar lake into the shore of a poem:

_ This celestial seascape, with white herons got up as angels, _  
_ flying high as they want and as far as they want sidewise _  
_ in tiers and tiers of immaculate reflections. _

He wishes Dean would come. Fall asleep and come fishing and see what Castiel has wrought; see that there is beauty, still, in the wormed-out crevices of his brain. The _ weightless mangrove island, _ the _ Gothic arches of the mangrove roots. _ Why are humans always singing of the water’s edge? That’s right, he remembers — they cannot live beneath its surface. A whole universe, glimpsed only from its margins. _ A fish jumps, like a wildflower, in an ornamental spray of spray. _

His mind is wandering away from him, slipping like a fistful of sticks from his grasp. What else does the poem say? He can’t remember. _ Bright green leaves edged neatly with bird-droppings, like illumination in silver. _ But there was something else there, too —

_ It does look like heaven, _ the poem tries to console him; _ it does look like heaven — _

_ But a skeletal lighthouse standing there _  
_ in black and white clerical dress, _  
_ who lives on his nerves, thinks he knows better. _  
_ He thinks that hell rages below his iron feet, _  
_ that that is why the shallow water is so warm, _  
_ and he knows that heaven is not like this. _

Castiel can’t help himself. He sits down on the curb of a street and laughs.

He laughs for a long time. Enough for three separate passersby to slow, as if to offer him help, then think better of it and hurry onward again. He must look horrifying, in his bloodstained shirt. Dangerous.

The fourth lingerer, he looks in the eye. He knows his own are bloodshot, crazed. “‘_Heaven is not like flying or swimming_,’” he tells the stranger, “‘_but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare._ _When it gets dark I will remember something strongly worded to say on the subject_.’”

“Okay, buddy,” says the stranger. He crouches down, and doesn’t quite reach to touch Castiel’s shoulder. “But it already _ is _ dark out, have you noticed? We’d better get you to a shelter, if you think you can walk.”

He’s close enough for Castiel to hear his heartbeat, to smell the blood in his veins. The stranger looks a little like Dean, he realizes. Not a lot; just a little. Something about the line of his jaw and the attention hiding behind the humor in his eyes.

“Thank you,” he says gravely, “but I have a home. Shelter. I’m going there already.”

\---

The bunker is safe, and warm. The curse burrows deeper, as if a hospitable climate is just what it needs. Sam and Dean wrap Castiel in blankets. After he tries to kill them, once, they also wrap him in chains.

He insists on that. Then he quickly forgets it. He keeps trying to wander off, only to be pulled up short; there’s an uncertain look in Dean’s eyes when he watches him, primed for devastation. Certain words sideline Castiel’s conscious faculties entirely. _ Metatron _is one of them.

He loses track of what’s happening. He imagines his chains as mangrove roots, or as bladderwrack, or as a school of piranhas, nipping away at his all-too-human flesh.

He wakes up on a street somewhere distant, chasing what his mind informs him is _ prey. _

Dean stops him, of course. Dean will always find him, always stop him from hurting himself or others beyond repair. He stops Castiel with _ words, _ this time, sidling closer with his hands up, and it takes Castiel a long moment to process the woman’s neck between his hands. Longer to still to complete the thought that _ Dean could have punched him, thrown him off her. _Should have. Instead, he lets Castiel rein himself in on his own.

Castiel repays him by beating him halfway senseless.

His vision doubles — triples — as he rains down blows. Multiplies a thousand times, a compound eye: all the Dean Winchesters he has killed. The Dean on his knees in the crypt, pleading. The Dean who brought an angel blade down into a book beside Castiel’s head.

He thinks that last is the only one Dean remembers, or the only one he’d call important, because afterward, back at the bunker, he refuses Castiel’s healing. “I had it coming,” he says, roughly, and Castiel’s throat closes around the words: _ then so did I — are you insane? — so did I. _

_ I love you, _ he thinks also, helplessly, in the useless atrophied part of him that might have once become a human soul.

\---

Castiel is tired.

Dean keeps saying he just needs to rest up; he’ll be right as rain in no time. Castiel hears, _ you’re useless, _ and he is. He’s not disputing it. Sam gives him passwords for something called “Netflix,” and that’s a pleasant distraction. It’s nice, having something else to think about besides the toxic futility of your own existence.

He discovers something called “YouTube,” as well. That’s even better than Netflix, sometimes, because it requires less attention. There are videos of everything you can think of there. Detailed analyses of his favorite TV shows. People sitting in their bedrooms playing guitars and singing. Grainy footage of old rock concerts — Castiel still struggles to parse the poetry. Medieval cooking demonstrations. Clips from nature documentaries.

There are even videos of fish. Castiel likes those; they seem safer than the dream-world where Dean never returns. A fish in a computer screen, he can read to with impunity. He has no control over its environment, its shape, the water it breathes.

When Dean’s home, he insists on movie nights. He makes popcorn and shows Castiel old westerns and horror movies and sometimes says the lines along with the actors, under his breath. At first, Sam watches with them, but there’s usually an irritated tangle of nerves in his shoulders; eventually, he says, “Cas, you know you don’t _ have _ to say yes to everything he says you should watch.”

“I know,” says Castiel. “But I want to.” And he does; not only for the way that answer makes Dean beam.

Sometimes, he believes Dean that he’ll get better. He just can’t imagine how to get there. He has done so much; he is so tired. He learns how to get his favorite poetry books in an app on his phone, and reads:

_ I'd like to get away from earth awhile _  
_ And then come back to it and begin over. _  
_ May no fate willfully misunderstand me _  
_ And half grant what I wish and snatch me away _  
_ Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: _  
_ I don't know where it's likely to go better. _  
_ I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, _  
_ And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk _  
_ Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, _  
_ But dipped its top and set me down again. _  
_ That would be good both going and coming back. _  
_ One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. _

\---

He gives himself to Lucifer.

\---

Later, he’ll wonder why. He’ll know he had his reasons — that he believed he acted for the best. (Castiel has always believed he acted for the best.) But other, smaller reasons impel him too. Weariness. A desire to tune out; drop off; let someone else run this show for a while. Robert Frost has nice ideas, but Heaven’s not an option for Castiel.

Sam and Dean have enough to deal with, anyway, and Castiel is of no help to them. He sees the way Dean goes still and spell-bound when Amara’s name comes up, and he knows it’s not quite the same as how he’s spell-bound by Dean, but it — stings, nonetheless. And he’s ready for things to stop stinging.

So he goes deep inside, and for the most part, he stays there. Watching TV in the bunker’s kitchen, letting himself live in the fiction that Dean is always nearby, out of sight. He doesn’t think much about poetry, or fish, and he rarely tries to dream.

There’s one exception. A day when he yields to temptation, and wanders down the bunker’s stairways and deeper, down through the mazed pathways of his own mind. He passes Hell, away on the right — exchanges a nod with it — but he’s going somewhere different.

There are no birch trees growing around the edges of the lake, which is Castiel’s first clue that this dream is not entirely his own. The second is the voices: a man’s, low and rumbling, and a hesitant child’s.

_ Just let it float, Dean. Rushing’s how you fuck things up, just like in hunting. _

_ Sorry, sir, _ says the child’s voice, and Castiel moves far enough to see him, through the trees: a Dean so young that a tiny sound punches its way out of Castiel’s lungs.

Both father and son look up. That motion is practiced, identical; Castiel sees Dean’s eyes narrow deliberately, a mask falling over his little face. He watches the trees. Castiel stays perfectly still, invisible.

“Just a deer, do you think?” Dean asks, after a moment. Anxiety shades his voice, and his muscles tremble from the effort of not turning to seek his father’s approval.

“Yeah,” says John, slowly. “Maybe.”

As he speaks, there’s a sudden tug on Dean’s fishing line. The stoic control cracks; he spins to seize the pole before it can be tugged from his grasp. “I got one!” he shouts, unadorned joy, and John’s laughing, a hand on Dean’s shoulder, another one on his elbow. “All right, reel it in — steady does it —”

Dean’s face is still fighting to reassemble itself; to fold its grin into something that more closely resembles his father’s calm. It keeps busting out, though, and then he’s not trying to hide it. He’s pulling the fish from the water, brandishing it proudly, and John’s smiling too, leaning back in his chair with love in the lines of his eyes.

This moment is not Castiel’s to trespass on. He fades gently into the wind, turns a corner, and he’s back in the bunker again.

The next time he wakes up, it’s to the end of the world.

Amara is winning, God dying, and Castiel’s play for Lucifer never mattered; Lucifer was useless in the end. Castiel is even more useless, but Dean still looks at him like a blessing of water — Dean keeps glancing over at him in the passenger seat of the Impala like he’s something precious. His face is haloed by the fading sun.

And then, a hope: a chance. It’s a suicide mission, and Dean accepts it without blinking. The Castiel of years past would be wracked with guilt about that — but what he feels now is simply a pure and piercing sorrow. Anything else would be a disservice to the calm in Dean’s eyes.

“I could go with you,” he offers.

“No, no,” says Dean. “I got to do this alone.” Then he looks at Cas, really looks at him, and adds: “Listen, if — when — this works, Sam — he’s gonna be a mess. So look out for him, okay? Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

Castiel feels like his heart is drowning within him. “Of course,” he says.

\---

And Dean lives.

Dean lives, and with him something dazzling and unruly lives in Castiel’s chest. Dean lives, and Castiel feels as though he’s unfurling, some long-neglected leafy thing inside him turning its face to the sun. Dean lives, and Castiel wants to touch him, to make sure — face, ribs, hips, broad shoulders and brow knotted with a hesitant sort of awe.

Because Dean is also unfurling, and the sun is Mary Winchester: flesh-and-blood and flannel-clad, back from the grave and occupying her modern world slowly, by degrees. Castiel watches her, and tries to align the hazy saint of Dean’s memories with this wary hunter. He sits with her, once — just the two of them. “You know,” he says, “Dean told me what you used to say to him every night, when he was a child.”

He gives Mary a chance to fill in the blank, but she doesn’t, so he adds: “_Angels are watching over you._”

“Were you?” She’s picking at a loose thread on her sleeve.

“No. Well — someone undoubtedly was, but they may not have had your sons’ best interests at heart.” He looks at her steadily. “I am now, and I do.”

Her jaw tightens. Her words come out in tight formation, almost tripping, like she doesn’t want to think better of them: “And that’s supposed to be good enough?”

Castiel sits still for a moment, feeling the blow.

“They’re hunters. The one thing I’ve tried my whole life to escape. Castiel, imagine going to sleep one day and waking up thirty years later to find that your worst nightmare — the _ very worst one _ — has come true.”

Castiel’s jaw aches. He realizes he’s clenching it. He has seen Dean’s nightmares, and they were always true. He has seen Sam’s nightmares, and taken them on himself. He knows that both of them, in their own ways, dread little more than being a nightmare personified.

“With all due respect,” he says quietly, and he can hear the fire crackling in his voice; “there are many worse nightmares than that.”

But Mary only sighs and shakes her head. “Not to me,” she says, as if that’s good enough, and then she pats his hand and rises from the kitchen table. “Thanks for the chat, Castiel.”

He watches her go, wordless. _ Thank you for creating the man I love. I wish you could see him as I do. _

\---

There are things to attend to: the hunt for Lucifer first among them, now that he’s free of Castiel and loose in the world. That’s Castiel’s responsibility, and so he shoulders it, but he tries not to fall out of touch like he has in the past. _ How is your mother? _ he texts to Dean, and gets a different answer each day.

_ Seems good. Really digging the modern snack food scene. _

_ Bit banged up from the hunt but she’ll be fine. _

_ I dunno, Cas. _

_ Needs “time” I guess _

_ Really unfairly good at words with friends, who taught her to use a smartphone _

Castiel smiles at that one. He types back: _ The same person who taught me. _

_ Yeah, well. You suck at words with friends, which makes no sense cause you know literally everything. _

_ I’m not omniscient, Dean. _

_ Every WORD then. _

_ Fair enough. Almost. _

They fail to catch Lucifer in the form of Vince Vicente, and succeed when he takes over the body of the President of the United States himself. It’s not without complications, though. A nephilim fathered, its missing mother, and Castiel sitting in the driver’s seat of the Impala, staring down the road where Sam and Dean must have been taken: alone.

It doesn’t seem possible. The Winchesters have escaped Heaven and Hell and Purgatory, stopped the Apocalypse and saved God and killed Death himself. Mere humans should be nothing to them. An earthly prison, no obstacle.

But they’re nowhere to be found.

Castiel drives the Impala back to the bunker. It’s a long road, stained brown and white by the winter Midwest sky; he passes the Mississippi River and its monuments, ancient mounds and a modern arch that rears high against a city skyline. He drives on. The Impala doesn’t seem happy under his hands, or maybe that’s his imagination. The last tape Dean played rolls on until it reaches its end, and then it whirs and clicks there until Castiel finally reaches to turn the tape deck off.

He pulls into the bunker’s garage in silence. Mary is already there, pacing restless in the war room. She turns and stills when he comes in. “Castiel, what happened? Where are Sam and Dean?”

Castiel sighs, and braces himself, and tells her what he knows.

When he finishes, she merely stands there for a moment, processing. Then she says: “You left them.”

The blow of it rocks him back on his heels. “No, I — Dean told me to go. The woman —”

“The one you lost?”

“I didn’t. I, I thought that she —”

“Stop making excuses!”

_ Where were you? _ he wants to snap. _ You left them too. You are lucky enough to have the chance to love them, and you had better things to do. _

But it’s as if his words have landed anyway. Mary sighs heavily. When she meets his gaze again, her eyes are wounded. “Why — if they needed help, why didn’t they call me?”

“You were out.” It’s the ultimate pole in the Winchester paradigm; the one Mary herself has been mourning. It’s foolish of her not to see it.

She sighs again. She says, more to herself than to him: “How did we let this happen, Castiel?”

But Castiel knows how. He just doesn’t know how to fix it.

\---

He tries Crowley. He tries scouring the bunker’s lore. He even tries the angels, but none will come to his aid.

If only he could still wing his way to Dean’s dreams — he must be sleeping, sometimes, wherever he is. He could tell Castiel whatever is needed to find him. But all the versions of Hell Castiel tries to wander are empty, and the lake in the fishing dream is desolate, leaves gone just like Dean is, barely a ripple on the surface of the water.

There have been times when Castiel’s imagined, idly, what might happen if Dean ever came back to this dream. Would he ask Castiel to stay? Would they sit here on this dock, quiet together, while a fishing line floats on the water’s bright edge?

But there’s nothing, nothing, no one, barely the distant call of a crow and the breath of an undecided breeze.

Castiel doesn’t create anything, those months. He makes his daily rounds of the bunker without turning on the lights; why should he, with no human eyes to require them? He sits by the lake and endeavors to feel nothing; endeavors, sometimes, to feel his grief in all its human agony, to remember what that was like.

He isn’t sure if there are any fish in the lake, like this, and he doesn’t have much appetite for reading. He makes it through barely a single brief poem, in all the time they’re gone, quoting it aloud in fragments to the empty sky, its emptier reflection. “_Since you left the house, its emptiness has hurt / all thought._” And: “_Absence / rocked love’s balance, unmoored / the days._ _They buck and bound —_”

Somewhere distant, his cell phone is ringing.

His phone is always ringing, never ringing. Mary, checking in about a hunt she’s taken because he’s too helpless. Crowley, making a nuisance of himself. It doesn’t matter. He clears his throat. “_They buck and bound / across the calendar —_”

His phone rings again. He clenches his teeth, and tries to resume. “_Need breaks on my strand. You’ve gone; I am at sea._”

A third time. Castiel sighs, gives up, and lets the dream fade.

His phone is buzzing its way across the library table. He looks down, and it’s an unknown number. He sighs again, and answers: “What?”

“Cas,” says Dean.

\---

Later — after they’re all together again; after the arrangement with the British Men of Letters and the rendezvous on Highway 34, after the revelation of Sam and Dean’s deal and after Castiel kills the reaper who holds it, and damn the cosmic consequences — with Dean stiff and glaring and Sam quiet and Mary smiling for all four of them, doing her best to pretend it’s not a little forced — Castiel slips away to the dream again, to say thank you.

He’s not sure why he thinks the dream needs thanking. He’s annoyed enough at Dean — at all of them, stupid Winchesters with their stupid martyr complexes — that he wants to say none of this out loud. But it needs to be said, in one way or another.

Briefly, he imagines what he’ll do if Dean is here. But he isn’t, of course. So Castiel sits down on the dock with pen and paper, and writes down the poem he means to give away. It’s by Tomas Tranströmer, who has already given much to this place; this time, Castiel wants to make it formal.

He writes:

_ In February existence stood still. _  
_ Birds didn’t fly willingly and the soul _  
_ chafed against the landscape the way a boat _  
_ chafes against the dock it lies moored to. _

_ The trees stood with their backs to us. _  
_ Snow-depth was measured with dead straw. _  
_ Footprints grew old out on the crust. _  
_ Under a tarp, language withered. _

_ One day something appeared at the window. _  
_ Work came to a halt, I looked up. _  
_ The colors burned. Everything turned around. _  
_ The land and I sprang toward each other. _

He lets the finished page slip gently into the water. It floats there, and the ink begins to bleed. Slowly, slowly, it spreads and swirls — turns sparkling and blue. Green races up the trees; gold fountains where the sun touches them. A fish leaps. The poem is gone.

Satisfied, Castiel returns to the bunker, and Dean’s blessed, petty, infuriating, _ human _ mood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems quoted in this chapter:
> 
> Tomas Tranströmer, "Kyrie"  
Tomas Tranströmer, "Winter's Formulas"  
Elizabeth Bishop, "Seascape"  
Robert Frost, "Birches"  
Seamus Heaney, "Valediction"  
Tomas Tranströmer, "Face to Face"


	9. Blackberry, Blackberry, Blackberry

Things spin ever tighter, that winter and spring.

There are times when Castiel thinks Dean is looking at him too long, too close. There are moods where Dean is inexplicable to him: first angry, then wounded, then grinning and familiar, possessive even. He meets Ishim and declares him a dick, and he’s even less wrong than Castiel ever realized; they fight, and Ishim gloats, and Dean listens to the threats against Castiel’s life and the threats against his own. His gaze finds Castiel’s bleary one, across the room. His eyes say: _ Never. _

And then, later, again: Castiel dying, black ooze bubbling from the very architecture of his grace, spilling down his human chin. “I love you,” he manages, “I love — all of you,” but it’s Dean whose face stuns him, the soul-sick acceptance there, like he’s not going to waste Castiel’s last minutes on useless denial.

Only they _ aren’t _ his last minutes, and Dean fusses over him the whole ride home to the bunker; brings him soup and blankets until Castiel finally insists, forcefully enough, that he feels better, all the way better, Dean, really. They don’t talk about what he said — _ L-O-V-E _. But a few days later, as Castiel’s preparing to leave again, resuming his search for Kelly Kline, Dean knocks on the open door of his room.

“Hey, uh,” he says when Castiel looks up, voice gruff and deliberately careless. “Figured you could use some tunes for the road.”

He holds out a cassette tape. Its label reads: _ Dean’s Top 13 Zepp Traxx. _ The marker ink is fresh; it still carries a hint of a chemical smell.

Castiel studies it gravely for a moment before taking it. His fingertips brush Dean’s.

“Uh.” Dean clears his throat, letting his hand drop. “You do know how to use those, don’t you? It’s not like an iPod or whatever, you gotta rewind if you want to play it again. And don’t leave it sitting out in the sun.”

“Thank you, Dean,” says Castiel.

Dean retreats. “I don’t even know if angels like music,” he adds, over his shoulder. “But — y’know.”

Castiel doesn’t know. But the poem he reads the fish that night seems ever more relevant to how he spends his hopes and his days:

_ Do not get too close to your dreams: _  
_ they are like smoke and they could vanish — _  
_ they are dangerous and they might linger. _

When he’s not playing it, he tucks the cassette tape in his breast pocket, next to his heart.

\---

Castiel dies.

It happens the night the nephilim Jack is born — the nephilim Castiel’s sworn his allegiance to; Kelly Kline’s son. Dean doesn’t understand it, hasn’t seen what Jack has to promise, but he’s there that night, too — along with Mary, Sam, Crowley, Lucifer, back once more from the Pit.

There’s a battle. A rift opened between universes; Crowley’s spell to close it. But Lucifer still needs stopping, and Castiel marches unto the breach, hears Dean behind him yelling, struggling — “_Cas? Cas! Cas!_”

Lucifer’s grinning, Castiel slashing and parrying. Dean’s voice is gone through the rift; he tries to calculate how much time he has. He will make it back to that voice, if it’s the last thing he does.

It is.

\---

This time isn’t like the other occasions he’s died. In the past, God has brought him back all but instantly, at least as his perception runs. This time, he floats for a long time, and when he wakes, it’s like swimming through black tar, with a distant sensation that someone has called his name.

He’s lying on something. It might be nothing. He sits up, slowly; he stands.

Around him, blackness stretches imperceptibly. It’s impossible to tell if his view runs a few feet or a thousand miles. “Hello?” he calls. “Hello!”

It takes a long time to find anyone, or anything. He wanders through darkness; he walks on darkness. His throat aches with incongruous thirst, and it makes him think of Dean’s long sun-scorched walk, nearly ten years ago now, freshly raised from his grave.

Finally, something changes.

Castiel isn’t sure how he senses it, exactly; only that he does. Some sort of an alien intelligence, gathering itself up from the nothing. Watching him.

He goes still. His heart is beating fast. He says, out loud, “I know you’re there.”

When he turns around, he comes face to face with himself.

Or — not himself. It’s something else, wearing his body. A _ cosmic entity, _ it calls itself, and the place it lives is the Empty. “Angels and demons,” it tells him, in its strange, snide, giggling little voice; “you all come here when you die.”

_ Then I have enemies in this darkness, _ Castiel thinks. _ It’s dangerous here. _ Which is foolish, of course; what could they do to him now? “Every angel that ever died is here?”

“Yes,” sighs the entity, “sleeping an endless peaceful sleep. You know I… I was sleeping, too.” It’s at Castiel’s shoulder suddenly, leaning close, words coming faster. “Hey, uh — since we’re _ pals_, there’s something I’ve gotta know. I’ve just gotta ask. Hmm. _ Why are you awake? _ ‘Cause, fun fact — in all of forever, nothing ever wakes up here. I mean, _ ever_. Ever. And second fun fact, when you woke up, I woke up, and I don’t _ like _ being awake, so — _ what’s up, smart guy_?”

Castiel stares, taken aback. “I don’t know.”

The entity snarls, “Well, _ think!_”

But Castiel already is. About Dean’s voice breaking — _ Cas! _ About the deal that sent Dean to Hell, Sam’s body dead and laid out on a thin, bare mattress and a darkness inside him that couldn’t be bridged. About Dean’s conviction, long ago, that Sam must have sold his own soul, too.

“The Winchesters. Sam and Dean,” he says, dread pooling within him. “They must have made a deal.”

But the entity is shaking its head. “No. No, no, no. Not with me, and I’m — I’m the only one that has any pull here.” It moves restlessly, circling in front of Castiel. “Not Heaven, not Hell, not G-O-D himself. So think _ harder_. Rack that perky little brain of yours!”

It reaches out to rap, hard, on Castiel’s forehead. “Stay away from me,” Castiel growls.

“Okay, fine,” the entity sings, seizing him; “I’ll rack it for you!”

And Castiel is —

_ He is riding in the passenger seat of the Impala. In the darkness, raindrops shine on her hood, reflecting orange street lights as they rumble past. Dean is laughing, his left hand propped casually on the wheel. _

_ He is in Naomi’s chair. Needles pierce him, unravel him. He spills colors and states his name. _

_ The water on the lake glints hard as metal. Something is singing. _

_ Dean carries a tray of burgers from the kitchen; sets it down on the library table and squares his shoulders as if to disguise his eager pride. Mary looks up; Sam hides laughter. _ I know it’ll just taste like molecules, _ Dean says, _ but Cas, I made you one too —

_ His grace is ebbing from the slash in his neck. His grace is soaring; his grace is faltering. Flaming out. _

_ He is riding in the passenger seat of the Impala. Dawn streaks the horizon and turns her dark metal gold. Dean is laughing, his right hand on Castiel’s knee. _

When he comes to himself, he’s face-down on the floor. Everything hurts. He feels combed-through, pulled apart; it’s worse than any of Naomi’s sessions. “What did you,” he tries, and his voice comes out as a high-pitched croak; he tries again. “What did you do to me?”

The entity strokes its chin. “I read your mind,” it tells him, “such as it is.”

His mind; everything he’s been through and everything he wishes for. The vision of Dean in the Impala lingers in Castiel’s eyes, and he aches; he’ll never see him again. “What do you want?”

“What do I want? I want you to _shut up._ I want — hmm. Having you awake, it’s like a _gnat_ flew right up here and it’s _trapped,_ and it’s _buzzing_ _—_”

But through the haze of misery, an idea is beginning to form in Castiel’s mind. “Having me awake causes you pain.”

The entity props its chin on its fist, looking down at Castiel like he’s an idiot. “If you can’t sleep, I can’t sleep. Yeah? And I like sleep. I _ need _ sleep.”

“Then get rid of me.”

“Oh, I _ should, _ should I?” It tilts its head. Castiel should get up off his knees. He has no strength to get up off his knees.

“Send me back to Earth,” he finishes, and looks up to meet the entity’s eyes.

\---

It doesn’t come easy.

Cosmic entities that predate the existence of time are nothing if not stubborn, and this one is fresh from a billion-year nap. It taunts Castiel; it reaches into his mind again and shows him all his failings, every time he’s let the Winchesters down. “I know what you hate,” it sings, “I know who you _ love_,” but that can’t hurt Castiel, because he knows it, too.

“Release. Me,” he demands, again and again; keeps demanding until his voice is hoarse. The entity drops him to the floor, kicks him in the gut and punches him in the face, and his body must be real enough here, because it certainly hurts. When he’s lying and coughing on the floor, the entity strokes his hair, its voice a demented sing-song: “Let’s just try and sleep. Infinite peace, yes? No regrets. No pain.”

If there’s one thing Castiel’s learned from the Winchesters, it’s that pain and regret are the price of something worth fighting for.

“Save yourself,” commands the entity, and Castiel raises his head and answers, “I’m already saved.”

And so the standoff begins.

\---

The first day is devoted to Castiel-as-punching-bag.

Maybe the entity thinks it can knock him out or shut him up; neither works. There are limits, Castiel realizes, to the physical damage he can suffer here. Everything hurts, but it fades again, like a — he wracks his memories of being human. Like a _ bee sting, _ he realizes, remembering one day when Nora sent him to remove a nest under the eaves behind the shop.

The second day — _ days _ are unmarked here, and yet still Castiel knows them — the entity decides to ignore him. It sits cross-legged and eyes-closed and hums to itself, an unceasing monotone drone.

So Castiel starts to sing.

He’s not a _ good _ singer, and he doesn’t know many songs. Thirteen, more or less, off of a many-times-played cassette that rests even now, miraculously unbroken, in the breast pocket of his shirt. “_Leaves are falling all around,_” he starts, voice quavering; “_it’s time I was on my way —_”

The entity twitches but doesn’t open its eyes.

“_Thanks to you, I’m much obliged,_” Castiel sings, mouth quirking with irony, “_for such a pleasant stay._”

By the end of the first verse, the entity is staring at him balefully. “What are you doing,” it says.

“_Ramble on,_” Castiel sings by way of answer. “_And now’s the time, the time is now, to sing my song —_”

The entity tries to beat him senseless again. It turns out, Castiel can keep singing anyway.

\---

The third day, Castiel invents a cassette player.

He’s already run through his mixtape a dozen times by memory, fumbling over lyrics and wavering on every note. But it occurs to him, after a while: he knows how to manipulate dream worlds. And what is he, right now, if not a dream?

First, he tries to create a boombox, like he’s seen in movies, but he’s never used one in real life. He inserts the tape into it, and nothing happens. So he considers it for a moment, banishes it, and creates a car.

Black paint, chrome wheels, Devil’s trap in the trunk. Castiel lavishes as much detail as he can on it — the initials carved in the floorboards, the lego caught in the vent. The entity is nowhere to be found; it seems to have decided Castiel will be easier to ignore if he’s out of sight. It’s about to learn otherwise.

When Castiel presses the cassette into the Impala’s tape deck, it starts right where he left it, in life: the first rollicking guitar riff of “Houses of the Holy.” _ Let me take you to the movie, can I take you to the show — let me be yours ever truly, can I make your garden grow — _

The entity rematerializes by the third verse. Castiel grins at it, and sings along: “_Let the music be your master. Will you heed the master’s call?_”

This time it doesn’t even try to shut him up. Just stands there watching like it has a decision to make.

\---

The fourth day, Castiel makes lakes and rivers and trees and birds and fish.

He weaves the music through everything. The streams are guitar strings, pegged to mighty oaks. A school of minnows makes them shimmer; a deer crosses, plucking one with its hooves. The trees’ twigs tap along to the rhythm of the drums.

“I can keep going,” he points out, “until your entire Empty is full.”

The entity has a sour look on its face. It reaches out and points, and black ooze devours a fawn. Then its mother. Then the tree that shelters them.

Castiel frowns, concentrates, and makes half a dozen more.

\---

The fifth day, he wakes among blackberries.

Their scent is warm in the sun, ripe and sweet. His brain announces it as a million molecules, esters and terpenes, but Castiel remembers being human: pricking his fingers on decadent stems. They were everywhere behind the Gas ‘n’ Sip; along the Rexford train tracks — a bounty freely offered to those who had nothing, like him. He remembers: juice staining his fingertips, the smell colonizing his neurons until he felt dizzy with it, glorious, a sun-drunk insect rambling from stem to stem.

There’s a poem about that: _ The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven. _

Scent is always what Castiel forgets, in his imaginings. Sight and sound are easy — the fall of light, the wind, a guitar on an amplifier, a bird’s voice. Physical sensation is more erratic: the touch of a cool breeze, he’ll remember, or the way rough wood feels like on his bare hand, but what does it feel like under his feet? Does its grain make an impression through the soles of his shoes? How hard does an atmosphere press, when the air is still?

But scent is the hardest: unpredictable and impressionistic, so peripheral in the human sensory experience that they often forget they have it at all.

The Empty didn’t smell like anything. No matter how Castiel imagined it.

He sits, and runs his hands through the bleached grass. Its seeds tickle feather-light in his palms. It has a smell, too, one he suddenly remembers, from thousands of years ago: the dying Scythian, stretched out under the sky; the gifts he gave her senses to bear her on her way.

Castiel stands. His clothes are his own, though not the ones he died in. This is not the place he died, nor is it a grave, nor the charred remains of a pyre.

He doesn’t know _ where _ he is. He stands, and feels the sun on his face; he tips his head, and soaks in it. He thinks of Dean, rising under a similar sun, all those years ago: the pulse of Hell fresh in his hands, the dirt of his own grave staining his face.

That day, Castiel felt like a star: a triumph of atoms, cosmic, undeniable. Today, he feels like a compass, pointing only toward a place he calls _ home. _

\---

He walks, down blackberry lanes. The bushes tower so tall he can’t see what’s on the other side, only that the roads he finds are growing larger, swelling from a pair of ruts to graded gravel to a two-lane road, painted and paved. Occasionally, he reaches out to pluck a ripe, round berry, and sets it on his tongue.

Dean once spent a summer like this. The second-hand memory hits Castiel like a blast of hot highway wind: the overgrown motel where the Winchesters squatted that year, freshly shut down and still with working electricity; blackberries move faster than power companies. Sammy, seven going on eight and asking too many uncomfortable questions: _ where is Dad going? Why do we have so many guns? _

Castiel aches for that Dean, for all that he’d already faced and all the battles he had not yet learned to dread. That summer, Dean’s war was against the future, the dying of an impossible dream: _ maybe we’ll find the thing that killed Mom before Sammy’s old enough to understand. Maybe this will all be over and we can live in a house again, and Sam can have a pair of soccer cleats and shin guards, and Dad will be home every night — _

He fought it with blackberries: buckets of blackberries, jars of blackberries, yogurt containers of blackberries. Minifridges of blackberries, filling up from Room 14 back down the line. That was the tactic, whenever Sam’s curiosity got too dangerous: _ Come on, gotta pick more berries. We have to get them before they get too ripe and fall off. _

_ What are we going to _ do _ with all these? _ Sam would ask, and Dean would answer: _ I’m gonna make blackberry grog, like in your Redwall books. And blackberry cordial and blackberry muffins and blackberry cakes. _

Sam’s eyes, wide and credulous. _ Do you know how to do that? _

_ Of course I do. _

But they left the hoard of blackberries there, when John whirled in one night smelling of gunmetal and blood and packed his children up without a word. Turning the memory over, Castiel feels Dean’s bitter defeat, the picture of his father in his mind: painted in awe, and in anger, and in love.

Sylvia Plath wrote about blackberries. Robert Hass wrote about blackberries, too: _ the notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of _ blackberry _ corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. _

Castiel doesn’t believe that. Hass didn’t, either. He believed in other things: childhood; a little orange-silver fish called _ pumpkin-seed; _ a woman he might have loved.

_ But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, _  
_ the thing her father said that hurt her, what _  
_ she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous _  
_ as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. _  
_ Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, _  
_ saying _blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

\---

Castiel comes to a town. It’s a small one, and all but deserted. The gas station is closed for lunch; a dog, sleeping outside, opens one eye to look at him, then closes it again as if the effort has been a great indignity.

Castiel loiters outside for a little while, hoping to find someone with a phone he can borrow; but he’s itching to move on.

Another few hours walking; another town that’s little more than a gas station and an old water tower. Here, at least, Castiel flags down a passing pickup. The man inside has to lean across the seat to crank down the passenger window. “Looking for a ride?”

“One might help,” Castiel tells him, honestly, “but mostly, I need to use a cell phone.”

The driver straightens, and looks thoughtfully out his windshield for a moment. “Cell phones don’t work ‘round here,” he says, eventually, “but I guess I could run you to town.”

“Thank you,” Castiel says, and climbs inside.

Town, it turns out, is two hours distant; a dusty little grid of streets with a grocery store, three churches, and half a dozen bars. They’re filling up as the sun goes down, shoals of motorcycles gleaming at the curbs. Castiel’s driver pulls up next to one of them.

“Thank you,” says Castiel, again — the first words they’ve exchanged in a hundred miles. “Is there — do you have a cell phone I could borrow?”

The man looks at him again, from under bushy eyebrows. “Payphone,” he grunts, and reaches into his cupholder, rummaging briefly. Then he drops a few tobacco-stained quarters into Castiel’s palm. “Down that way.”

Castiel makes one wrong turn and has to circle back around the block. Then he finds it, in the alley behind Bison Bud’s Bar. A neon cross glows at his shoulder as he thumbs a quarter into the slot, dials the familiar number.

“Yeah.” Dean’s voice is gravel, hollowed out.

Castiel swallows. Suddenly, his human heart is beating fast.

“Hello, Dean,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems and songs quoted in this chapter:
> 
> Edith Södergran, "Dangerous Dreams"  
Led Zeppelin, "Ramble On"  
Led Zeppelin, "Houses of the Holy"  
Sylvia Plath, "Blackberrying"  
Robert Hass, "Meditation at Lagunitas"


	10. Rain Song

That first night in Dodge City, Castiel visits the dream.

The last day has been a dream in its own right. The all-night drive back to the bunker, speaking in low voices of the Empty; of Death; of Jack. It brings a pang to Castiel’s chest, hearing that Kelly’s son has made his home with the Winchesters: a love so fierce and sharp it hurts.

“That first day, he kept saying he was looking for his father,” says Sam. “We thought he meant Lucifer at first, but he meant you.”

It takes Jack a long time to fall asleep, stretched out on the couch among all the portraits of famous gunfighters. His eyes keep drifting open, seeking Castiel in the light at the kitchen table, and his mouth curves into a smile.

It’s after midnight when he finally turns onto his back and begins to emit gentle snores. Love beats in Castiel’s heart. He closes his eyes, and drops through a pool of water in his own mind; down, down, down, into the dream.

A part of him is certain he’ll find Dean there waiting — certain for no reason he can name. But he’s alone. He looks around, savoring the scent of oak leaves on the air. This is Dean’s dream; it never took any effort by Castiel to make it real.

He has something with him. This took effort: a boombox, or something like one, imagined from close study of the Impala’s tape deck on the ride here. It will accept cassettes, and it will play music. He sets it down on the end of the dock, carefully aligning its corners to the posts. He reaches into his shirt pocket, finds the mixtape, and slides it in.

He owes this place, for all it has given him. He owes it a song:

_ It is the springtime of my loving _  
_ The second season I am to know _

It’s the last song on the tape, and the hardest for Castiel to understand. Not because the lyrics are so obscure, but because Dean _ gave _ this to him: this slow, shimmering poetry, this blessing of rain.

_ Ain’t so hard to recognize _  
_ These things are clear to all from time to time _

Has he ever let it rain here? Now that he thinks of it, he can’t remember. He closes his eyes, and lets the breeze blow through him.

The guitar dances with the mellotron — a word Dean taught him; it’s the synthesizer that sounds like violins. They circle high together, a pair of butterflies meeting on the wing. Castiel lets the breeze pick up, stirring branches and rustling leaves. He lets the sky darken.

The first droplets are nothing but a patter and hiss in the leaves. They build slowly, a susurrus under the singer’s wail:

_ I felt the coldness of my winter _  
_ I never thought _  
_ it would ever go _  
_ I cursed the gloom that set upon us, 'pon us, 'pon us, 'pon us _  
_ But I know _  
_ that I love you so _

A droplet hits his face, and Castiel opens his eyes. The surface of the water is alive with raindrops, shimmering like beaten silver. They hammer and drum in the air all around him, speckling the planks of the dock, beginning to run; one clings to his eyelashes. Castiel breathes in deeply, and suddenly he’s laughing, laughing for joy, for all that has brought him here: this day, this place, this dream.

It’s the last time. He knows that suddenly, instinctively. It’s time to live in the waking world. To let his dreams live in the waking world, too.

_ This is the mystery of the quotient, quotient _  
_ Upon us all, upon us all a little rain must fall _

Castiel opens his eyes to find Jack watching him. His eyes are warm and trusting in the lamplight. From the bedroom, Dean and Sam’s snores mingle together, as beautiful a music as any Castiel’s heard. “You said you don’t need sleep,” Jack accuses, in a voice that’s half a yawn.

Castiel reaches out to ruffle his hair. “I don’t. But everyone needs to dream, from time to time.”

\---

The next day, they hunt together, all four of them, and Jack kills a man — an accident of eagerness, delight in showing what he can do.

The day after that, he leaves.

Dean comes to Castiel’s bedroom that night, carrying a bottle of whiskey in one hand and two glasses in the other.

He pulls out a chair without asking, sets the glasses on the nightstand one at a time. He pours the whiskey, and it’s with his eyes on the spill of amber liquid that he says: “We will find him, Cas.”

Castiel looks up. Jack’s been missing for seven hours, and they’ve driven in wide enough circles around the bunker, called enough local sheriff’s departments, to conclude that he must have teleported somewhere beyond their range. Self-loathing shrivels at Castiel’s insides; this is his fault.

Dean looks up at him like he can see it at work. He raises his eyebrows, capping the bottle, then holds out a glass.

With a sigh, Castiel takes it. “It just feels like — if I’d been here for him, I could have —”

“What,” interrupts Dean with a touch of humor, sitting back, “you shitting on me and Sam’s parenting skills?”

“No.” The remorse is immediate. “Of course not, Dean. I’m sorry.”

“Well, maybe you should be.” His mouth twists on a swallow of whiskey. “I — the last month ain’t exactly been easy.”

It’s a confession, frankly offered. Castiel looks at him, properly this time, and sees what he didn’t before: the lines of pain on Dean’s face; the weariness half-obscured by giddy days of cowboys and outlaws. “Dean,” he says, meaning it with all his heart: “I’m so sorry.”

Dean glances at him, sidelong, then away. “Drink up.”

Castiel obeys, letting the liquor burn at his tongue and the roof of his mouth for a moment before he swallows. “I don’t just mean for dying. I mean — everything that happened before. I lied to you and abandoned you, and I did it for Jack, but —”

“Cas.” Dean’s hand hovers in the air between them, as if to cut him off, or perhaps to reach out and touch. “Don’t. Okay? Just — don’t worry about it. You’re back; that’s what matters.”

His voice cracks on the last word. Castiel watches him, helpless, loving him; should he reach out and take Dean’s hand? But it drops before he can come to a decision, Dean’s eyes closing for an instant. When they open, they’re focused on the floor.

“Your mother,” says Castiel, gently. “Sam says she’s — there’s a chance she’s still alive, in Apocalypse World, and Jack can get you there.”

“Yeah,” says Dean, “maybe.”

“How are you doing?”

Dean glances up sharply, as if he’d like for a moment to deny he’s _ doing _ any kind of way about anything; then the stiffness drops out of his shoulders. He props his elbows on his knees. “I — I dunno, Cas. At first, with you gone, and Mom gone, it was — just — going through the motions, you know? But now —”

He stops there. _ Now, what? _ Castiel wants to ask, as badly as he’s ever wanted anything. He keeps his whiskey glass in one hand, the other clasped firmly on his own knee.

Dean lets out a little laugh, more a huff of breath and a flash of a smile. “We had a — the British Men of Letters brainwashed her, did you know that?”

The shock of revelation startles Castiel. He races back over the events of the last year; Mary’s distance with her children, her secrets, her disappearances. The Lance of Michael. “When?”

Dean waves that off. “Not when you think. Later. They had her killing hunters — she almost got Jody. But we — I — got her back. Had to go into her head to do it.”

And he tells Castiel, over a second whiskey, and a third: about his mother living in a dream of his own childhood. About baby Sam, and crusts cut off sandwiches, and _ I only want good things for you, Dean; _ about the betrayal of those words, the surge of hate.

“She didn’t want to face the reality of how your lives have gone,” Castiel murmurs.

“And I,” says Dean quietly, “I _ get _ it, you know? ‘Cause I was supposed to keep Sammy safe, that was, my — my whole thing, all my life, and I _ couldn’t. _ He’s had so much bad. But he’s —”

He falters. “Alive,” suggests Castiel. “And one of the best men I’ve ever known.”

“Yeah,” says Dean. “I’ve probably fucked him up, I mean I _ know _ I have, we’re freaking hunters for one, and all that marshmallow mac and cheese can’t have been good for the kid, but —”

“Dean,” interrupts Castiel, gently, “it’s probably time to stop worrying about the marshmallow mac and cheese.”

That startles a laugh out of Dean. It starts light, a chuckle, and grows, until he’s wheezing over his thigh; he looks up, and his eyes are bright with it, mouth curving, and Castiel wants to kiss it — wants to press his fingertips to Dean’s cheekbone and tilt his head back and _ show him, show him, _ how luminously perfect he is.

His thoughts are too slow for his chances. He doesn’t even know if, deep down, he wants to take them; what if it ruins what he and Dean have? “It’s good to have you back, Cas,” says Dean, again, voice warm and rough and quiet, and Castiel smiles and begins to tell him how he defeated the Empty with rock and roll.

\---

He’s more certain of himself, this year; more confident. He gets captured, and gets free. Stabs Lucifer through the heart, which won’t kill him, but will at least slow him down for a while. Gets the information they need to open a door to Apocalypse World, and wins the necessary ingredient from a pack of Syrian djinni. They try to lull him with a vision of the life he longs for, but Castiel breaks free.

He knows who he is, and what he has, and it’s more precious than galaxies. He knows what he wants, too, but that — he can wait on that.

Because Dean’s trust is blossoming, slowly, too, after all Castiel has done to ruin it. He doesn’t try to argue Castiel into staying home, staying safe, when there’s a job to be done. He looks at Castiel steadily and warns him, “Just don’t get dead again,” and Castiel knows that when he leaves he carries a piece of Dean’s heart.

It fills him with wonder. It makes him tread carefully, and carry himself tall.

In Heaven, on the latest of those missions, he comes face to face with Naomi.

The shock of it stuns him wordless for a moment. The old raw terror, the instinct to comply: “That’s enough, Castiel,” she says, as she steps into view, like she’s said so many times before.

In his old life, _ that’s enough, Castiel _ meant he’d erred. It meant he was due for correction.

He shifts back on one foot. He’s promised Dean not to get dead, but he won’t let himself be brainwashed either. He has his blade; five to one aren’t insurmountable odds. He will get out of here, if he has to kill them all to do it.

Naomi’s smiling as if she can read his thoughts. She can’t; she won’t ever again. “Relax,” she says, “I just want to talk,” and the other angels file from the room.

When they’re alone, she steps closer. But Castiel raises a hand, and she stops, an arm length’s away.

He could kill her if he has to.

She’s smiling, faintly. “You know, we never did see eye to eye.”

A million images are right there in his memories: Naomi bending close with a needle or a drill, selecting her insertion point. He probably knows her eyes better than anyone’s; better even than Dean’s. He doesn’t return her smile. “No, we didn’t. Because you stole my memories, and you threatened to ‘tear me apart,’ and you made me _ repeatedly act out Dean Winchester’s murder_, and you killed — _ many, many _ people.”

“Those were simpler times,” Naomi agrees.

“‘I’m sorry’ goes a long way.”

He doesn’t get one, of course. But he does walk out of Heaven with information, however grim. That, and old memories running through his mind: _ The famous spanner in the works. I think you came off the line with a crack in your chassis — you have never done what you are told. _

_ Good, _ he thinks, savagely, _ good — for that is my salvation. The part of me that lets light in. _

Or, _ in the words of a good friend, bite me, _ as he said to her at the time.

\---

They make it to Apocalypse World, and find their family, and make a plan to bring them home.

It’s dark and dingy here, trees towering improbably in the places that aren’t burned to rock. Some angel’s ill-conceived vision of a world without humans: the Garden, lush and green. There’s one cedar splitting directly out of the old storage tanks outside an abandoned Gas ‘n’ Sip, three hundred years old by any logic, but Castiel can sense the strange infirmity in its xylem, the flimsiness of a thing meant to build itself over centuries created in a single day.

He hides behind the cedar as Sam and Dean and Mary dart forward, blades at the ready, bodies low to the ground. Charlie and Ketch are in there, being tortured by angels, and the Winchesters mean to free them. Jack is waiting in front, Castiel out back, for any runners. His fingers flex on his blade, and — there:

A figure in a long, dark coat, shuffling oddly as it slips outside. Then it’s striding across the old parking lot, purposeful, but there’s still something strange about its gait, something that makes Castiel’s stomach turn.

It’s making for the Humvee parked a few yards from Castiel’s tree. Castiel slips into the shadows and behind it, circling.

Screams and flares of light from inside the building; angels are dying. Castiel makes it around the hood.

The figure moving to climb inside the cab is him.

It’s Castiel, but not Castiel. His eyes are clouded from too many needles; his movements share that queasy unreality, as if orchestrated less by muscles than by some disease living directly under his skin.

This is their specialist, Castiel realizes. Their torturer. It only makes sense that, given enough time, the angels would find some way to turn that fracture deep within him inside out.

“Don’t think that you are better than me,” hisses the creature that wears his face, when Castiel has him slammed to the side of the truck, blade at his throat; he’s barely resisting. His voice is strange, an accent with no origin. “We are the same.”

In a world of ruined roads, they have him traveling by truck. They must have clipped his wings when they made him this way.

It’s not anger that fills Castiel, or horror; just pity. This is a creature who never found an answer for all the strange words and longings inside him. Who never found a family.

“Yes,” he says, “we are,” and kills the thing he could have been.

\---

That summer is a long one, long and lovely, in the bunker and on the road. Castiel spends most of it hunting with Dean. Sam joins them when he can, but he’s pulled more and more among his obligations to the Apocalypse World refugees, his attempts to formalize a hunters’ network. Jack sometimes rides with them, asking bright questions from the Impala’s backseat; others, he stays at the bunker and teleports in with Sam for the showdown at the hunt’s end.

So there are a lot of evenings when it’s just the two of them. Stretching out on matching motel beds to watch whatever reruns Dean deems necessary; going out for burgers every night. Castiel starts visiting bookshops, when they have the time, and buying little volumes of poetry by writers he’s never heard of. Some of them, he loves; others elude him. Dean stands and reads over his shoulder sometimes, usually moving on before Castiel turns the page. Occasionally, he lingers.

They work a case at an abandoned orphanage in New England, the ghost of a nun who drowned children in the nearby lake. They dispatch the restless spirit of a firefighter killed by an arsonist, who’s turned around and started setting booby-trapped fires of his own.

Dean gets to ride in the fire truck, grinning wide as a child under the iconic hat. Later, Castiel hauls him coughing and choking out of poisoned smoke, and sits by his bedside all night cleansing carbon monoxide from his veins.

They drift south for a while, into hotter and stickier weather. Sam and Jack join them for a case in Miami, on a tip from Sam’s old zanna about a cursed hotel. They spend nearly a week investigating, but every time Dean casts a longing look toward the beach, Sam’s handing over another case file, another set of leads to track down.

Finally, they’re forced to conclude there’s nothing to hunt here; every one of the strange deaths appears entirely natural. Sam is itching to get back, and Mary and Bobby have something planned for the fourth of July, but Dean insists they drive — _ family road trip, _ he says. He hums along to the Latin music stations on the radio. Jack keeps asking Castiel to translate the lyrics, which make Sam mutter under his breath and Dean choke and blush.

They have a cookout for the Fourth in the weedy lot behind the bunker. It’s oppressively hot out in the sun, but all the refugees from Apocalypse World come, and a few of them get a soccer game going, with makeshift goals; soon Jack is out in the midst of it, and eventually Mary and Sam join in. Castiel stands by the grill with Dean and Bobby and watches.

It’s good to see Jack so happy. He still has bad dreams, Castiel knows; the people he couldn’t save.

“You could teach him about music,” he offers to Dean, one day as they’re driving. “Jack, I mean. It might help him like it helps you.”

Dean glances up from the wheel, swift and sharp. “What do you mean?”

Castiel considers his answer for a moment, picking at his hands. He knows what he means, but not how to put it into words; he’s seen the way Dean immerses himself in music to drown out the world, but also the way his spine realigns when a song he loves comes on the radio. Driving with the windows down and hand drumming on the Impala’s metal flank, or else going still and quiet, like someone’s reached into his chest and held his heart gently, a frightened bird.

He doesn’t know how to express it, and then suddenly, he does. “_The music is a glass house on a slope,_” he quotes, “_where stones are flying, stones are rolling. And the stones roll straight through, but every pane remains whole._”

Dean looks thoughtful, after that. He doesn’t say anything, but Castiel catches him leafing through his vinyl collection, later; pulling records out to consider, one by one.

Summer wears on. After months of work, Charlie and Sam crack open Terrance Clegg’s auction databases: all the monsters who bid for and won human body parts, complete with names and shipping addresses. It’s not perfect, and a lot of them have moved on, but it’s a start. Dean and Jack and Castiel and Sam go out more and more on precision hunts. A vamp in Cincinnati, a rugaru in Colorado Springs, three werewolves outside Omaha.

Then Mary and Bobby find Maggie dead on the riverside path, and the bright and fragile future they’ve all been framing comes crashing apart.

Lucifer has made it back to Earth. So has Michael. There’s no stopping them; they blow through the bunker’s wards like so much shredded fabric. Castiel’s body goes flying into a wall under the assault of an archangel’s grace, and his vision fractures, his limbs do not belong to him. He lies on the floor with his ears and his grace ringing, trying to convince his arms to push him upright. Through the sick chaos inside him he can hear Sam praying. He can hear Dean choking, Michael’s hand around his throat —

_ Could’ve done this quick, but I wanted to enjoy it. The moment when the soul leaves the body — _

_ NO, _ Castiel thinks, or shouts; his world is a roar of pressure and sound. Images whirl through him. Dean laughing, Dean smiling, Dean fighting for his life; a hand on the Impala’s steering wheel, a profile in neon light. Darkness. Sun on water. A tree. A hundred trees, all blown flat to the earth; a hand reaching free of the dirt —

_ It’s beautiful, _ growls Michael, and Dean’s eyes flutter closed.

But the pressure isn’t just in Castiel’s head. It rocks through the room, and Michael goes flying; Dean slumps gasping to the floor. And there’s Jack, eyes glowing, hand raised as he twists power through the air: _ You hurt my friends. You hurt my family! _

It only takes a moment. He leaves Michael bleeding and broken, shattered; suddenly, Castiel can stand. He gets slowly to his feet. Dean is doing the same, speaking quickly, voice hoarse: “They had a deal. Lucifer gets you, and Michael gets everything else. He's gonna nuke our world, Jack, just like he did his.”

Jack stares at Lucifer with betrayal shining in his eyes. “Is that why you wanted us to leave?”

_ Leave? _ What does he —

“He said —” Jack looks down. “He said we’d go to the stars.”

But the awe Jack had for his birth father is broken. It all spills out, now — the planned abandonment of Earth. Maggie’s memory of the thing that killed her. Jack’s truth spell, an instinctive surge of power, and Lucifer’s singsong confession. When the gold light fades, there’s no hesitation left in Jack’s eyes, only revulsion. “You’re not my father. You’re a monster,” he says.

Lucifer screams; Lucifer rants. “Jack —” starts Castiel, stepping forward, but Jack stops him: “Stay back. I’ll handle him.” Dean hovers half-behind a column, still leaning on the stair rail for support, a hand to his bruised throat.

“If I can’t have it with you,” says Lucifer to his son, voice cracking in a mockery of sorrow, “I — I don’t need you. I just need your power.”

And he lashes out, too quickly for any of them to stop. It’s the archangel blade in his hand, slicing a line across Jack’s throat. The grace floats free, and Lucifer’s sucking it down, before the shock even releases Castiel’s limbs — but Sam’s not frozen. Sam leaps forward, as Jack’s head lolls on his shoulders. Sam seizes Jack’s arm —

And Lucifer disappears, taking both of them with him.

\---

The bunker rings with silence. Castiel’s grace, a raw nerve, shudders; too much power has left this room, too quickly, and the vacuum it leaves behind makes him stumble. Dean stares around, eyes bruised with fear: “Sammy? Sammy!”

Facts whirl around them, upendings piled on upendings: Michael, here on Earth, their worst fears realized; Michael slumped and helpless on the floor. The dizzying force of Jack’s power, the sudden ease of its theft. Lucifer, vanquished, and Lucifer who will murder the world.

“This is the end,” says Michael, struggling upright, his back to a pillar; “of everything."

“No.” Dean’s voice is low, brutalized. His hands are shaking, his shoulders square. Suddenly, Castiel wants to reach out and — take him away, somehow, like he can’t do anymore; pull them both from this place. Somewhere safe, where they can’t lose any more than they’ve already lost.

“What if —” says Dean, “what if you had your sword?”

\---

Castiel sits on the library steps. He remembers, dimly, fumbling his way across the room to them, and sinking down. Watching Michael’s abandoned vessel die on the floor.

He should dispose of the body. Build a pyre and burn it. He doesn’t move.

Time passes; hours, maybe, or days. Mary and Bobby are there, asking Castiel what happened, and he can barely muster the words to reply.

Then — at long last — a creak of the bunker’s door.

Jack comes in first. He looks weary and battered — a bloodstain covers the front of his t-shirt — but whole. Alive.

A figure looms behind him. Too tall for Dean; too tall for Lucifer. Fear clenches Castiel’s gut, and he squints, searching for some sign of an angelic true form — but there’s none.

It’s just Sam.

He moves past Jack to the railing. Mary takes three steps forward, quickly, then stops dead. Sam’s face is bruised and bloody, too; his jaw is set.

“We killed Lucifer,” says Sam, in a quiet, steady voice. “But Michael took Dean.”

He’s saying more — asking Mary to put out a hunter APB, Bobby to start researching ways of containing archangels, Castiel to contact Ketch. Castiel stares up at him, but his eyes are seeing Dean: twisting back to look at him, grief and grace in his eyes, the moment before he disappeared.

He thinks he’s known. He thinks he knew all along, that this was a trap — that Dean wouldn’t be coming home.

He stumbles through his tasks, says little, thinks less. His mind is only a poem. It’s barely a poem, a sparse strand of words on a little loop of string.

_ I loved my friend. _  
_ He went away from me. _  
_ There’s nothing more to say. _  
_ The poem ends, _  
_ Soft as it began — _  
_ I loved my friend. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems and songs quoted in this chapter:
> 
> Led Zeppelin, "Rain Song"  
Tomas Tranströmer, "Allegro"  
Langston Hughes, "Poem"


	11. Dream Keeper

They find Dean and lose him again. 

Jack dies. Castiel bargains away his eternity, his chance at joy, to save him. It’s easy math.

But joy threatens, always; it builds on horizons, an impending thunderstorm. In every room Dean walks into, it crackles, ionizing the air. Jack’s smile is a west wind urging it on.

Lightning will strike him, Castiel thinks; maybe sooner than later. He tries to eke his careful joy from Dean’s smiles. His involved movie plot dissertations. His laughter on a three-hour ride with no music. All the shining moments, the mad hope, under the shadow of Michael’s return.

They get so close — _ so close _ to bringing him down. The spear in Dean’s hands, its blade slicing Michael’s arm —

And then Dean’s straightening, all his small tense muscles smoothing, as Michael’s vessel crumples to the floor.

\---

They get him back to the bunker and cuffed in the war room, which is better than last time, at least.

_ I shouldn’t have let this happen, _ Castiel keeps thinking; _ how could I let this happen? _

But agonizing over it is useless; Sam has a way to get them into Dean’s mind, to pull him back like Dean did Mary — assuming they can find where Michael’s buried him. “Last time Dean was possessed, he said it felt like he was drowning,” Sam says quietly. “This time — it’ll probably be worse.”

Anxiety hums in Castiel’s grace. He pulled Dean out of Hell once; he can do it once more.

He doesn’t know what he expects to find there. There are so many — _ so many _ steel traps waiting to crush him in their jaws. And so many are things Castiel could have stopped; what if he had rescued Dean earlier? What if he had defied Heaven before he did; what if he had been smarter, stronger — never unleashed the Leviathans, never let Dean take the Mark of Cain, never allowed Lucifer out of his Cage?

What if he had learned — one of those many chances, so many years ago — how to be human?

It’s the moment of violation that greets him, when they drop into Dean’s mind, when Castiel first raises a hand to comb through the terrors that lurk there: _ We had a deal! _ It hits him like a whiplash, stinging, but Dean’s not there.

He presses onward, inward. Hell — the rack and the knife. Dean’s father is everywhere; — _ didn’t care whether you lived or died. Why should you? _Sam is everywhere, suffering, dying, and all the others — Bobby, Jo, Ellen, Kevin, Charlie.

Cas —

It’s Dean’s _ No! _ that takes him. Because he doesn’t remember it, has no sense of it, until suddenly he does. He heard it through ears that rang with exploding stars; saw Dean’s face through the flare of his own grace, blazing into nothingness. _ No _ —

He draws back, shaking with Dean’s soul-deep need for _ Castiel, alive. _

“There’s so much,” he says, because Sam is staring, impatient; he can’t quite stop his thoughts from spinning. “So much trauma in Dean’s mind — so many scars —“

But Sam seizes his arm. “Cas, wait a second,” he says.

\---

They find Dean buried, not in trauma, but in happiness.

It’s a little bar in a rainstorm, craft beers on tap and a bag of limes on the counter, memorabilia of Dean’s itinerant life strewn across the walls. Pamela Barnes stands behind the counter with him, and he greets Sam and Castiel like he’s been expecting them; like he knew they were coming home.

_ The dream, _ he says, spreading his hands, and it’s already pulling Cas apart inside to destroy it. To wipe Pamela away as he did in life, burning her eyes and leaving her to die in that dingy motel in Wyoming — he remembers the lash of Dean’s words and his own sedated misery, the leash around his neck. _ Cas, you remember her. You burned her eyes out. Remember that? Good times. _

This time, he’s the one telling Dean. _ The dream. _ “No, no, it's not. It's just — _ a _ dream, Dean. That's all it is.”

It’s more than a dream. Dean stares for a moment, then scoffs, dismissing him, and Castiel wants so badly — _ so badly _ — to let him.

“Please,” he asks, and it’s a fishhook in his gut; “you have to — you have to try to remember, because the people in your life — in your real life, out there — we need you to come back.” _ We need you. I need you. I want you, I love you — _

Dean’s eyes are halfway to breaking. He glances between them.

“Poughkeepsie,” Sam says, and they shatter.

\---

Castiel made a promise to himself — not to live in his dreams. That winter, he breaks it, again and again.

Dean has Michael trapped inside his head, locked in the bar he built as a place of his own. Dean is distant, fragile and steely at once, laughing too often, too ready with a smile. Sometimes he seems to catch himself skimming his glances away, and looks back to meet Castiel’s eyes like he means something by it. Like he’s offering something deeper, some pool of emotion he can’t or won’t put into words.

It doesn’t make Castiel feel any better.

He visits his dream-fish, and wishes he could fathom building something like Dean would out of his own mind — somewhere warm and well loved, with _ people, _ a place for family. Castiel’s dreams are obscure, crowded with words and creatures that care nothing for him. “_Have you looked your dreams in the eye?_” he reads. “_They are sick and understand nothing — they have only their own thoughts._”

And: “_Do not get too close to your dreams: they are a lie, they ought to go — they are madness, they want to stay._”

And: “_Bring me all of your dreams, you dreamer. Bring me all your —_”

His throat closes up. Dean is on a path to his own destruction, again; Sam called today with news of a Ma’lak Box.

He thinks: _ I could go with you. _

He reads:

_ Bring me all of your dreams, _  
_ You dreamer, _  
_ Bring me all your _  
_ Heart melodies _  
_ That I may wrap them _  
_ In a blue cloud-cloth _  
_ Away from the too-rough fingers _  
_ Of the world. _

\---

Dean doesn’t throw himself to the bottom of the sea.

_ I would’ve come to find you anyway, _ Cas thinks, obstinate; _ you think I wouldn’t sit next to that box in the ocean for a thousand years? _ But it doesn’t come to that, and he’s grateful every day, for all that he can see Dean growing paler, the shadows on his face heavier. For all the threadbare confidence that’s fraying in his eyes.

Dean wants to hunt, and so they hunt: a witch thing down in Midland, ghosts in Alamosa. A pawn shop in Hartford, which Sam and Dean drive out to tackle themselves instead of passing it off to a local hunter — the backstory is personal, Castiel gathers. They come back with a strange story about a Pearl of Baozhu, and their father, and a Cas who wasn’t Cas. They all look shaken — Mary pale and shivering like her layers of flannel aren’t enough to ever keep her warm again.

Dean finds Castiel, later that night. “Cas,” he says, in a subdued voice, “I just want —”

Castiel looks up sharply. He’s working on a report for Sam; he sets down his pen. He can feel his pulse in his throat. Strange, that he used to not give himself a pulse, just because he didn’t strictly _ need _ one.

“I missed you,” says Dean. “The _ real _ you. I —”

_ Don’t you get it? They are all the real me, _ Castiel wants to say, and also, _ If he were here I would tear him limb from limb and paint his grace across these walls for hurting you. _ He’s already healed Dean, at his own insistence, felt Dean quiet and trembling under his touch. “Dean,” he starts.

“No,” says Dean, cutting him off. “Cas, I —”

But he flinches, then; squeezes his eyes shut like he’s racked with a blow from within.

It takes him a long moment to open them. When he does, Castiel is half out of his chair, opening his mouth, reaching out to touch.

Dean takes a sharp step back. “Never mind,” he says roughly, and before Castiel can answer, he’s backing out of the room.

\---

That moment haunts him. But it’s a week or more before Castiel gets his next chance to probe at it — to get Dean alone and _ ask. _

They’re on a hunt together this time, all four of them sharing a pair of motel rooms in a dusty New Mexico town. They’ve even brought Rowena in to assist. That means long hours of probing through the lore; Dean sighs and rolls his eyes loudly every time he turns a page. “You remember that summer we lived in Las Cruces?” he asks his brother, sucking on a pen. “Remember those green chile cheeseburgers, at Maria’s? Round the corner?”

And, later: “Y’know, there’s a diner across town that’s _ famous _ for its green chile cheeseburgers. Saw it on Yelp.”

Sam studiously ignores him. Jack looks between the two of them with naked fascination; Rowena’s wearing a smirk. Castiel keeps his eyes on his own book, but he can see Sam’s shoulders twitch higher and higher with annoyance until finally — Dean is dog-earing his own page without turning it, back and forth, back and forth — he slams his palms flat on the table and sits back.

He’s wearing the expression Dean calls his bitchface. And Dean’s already laughing with triumph, gathering his jacket, urging Jack ahead of him, tugging Castiel’s arm, before Sam’s even done granting them leave.

The diner is brightly painted and rich with the smell of food. They eat quickly, but linger over coffees. Dean drinks coffee at any hour of the day, lately, and this time he orders his with an extra shot of espresso; Jack does the same, ever the eager mimic, and Castiel sighs and lets it go.

“You know, I gotta say,” Dean comments magnanimously, as Jack slides out of the booth for the restroom. “I got a pretty good feeling about bringing Rowena in on this one. I think her and Sam have a chance of cracking it.”

Castiel nods. “They do have many books.”

“Yes, they do,” says Dean, but his gaze is on his hands suddenly, wrapped around the rim of his mug. He breathes in sharply, and squeezes both eyes shut.

“Dean —”

“I’m fine.” He’s not; his voice comes out wooden, and his eyes blink open again, but they’re still fixed on his coffee cup; thumb still moving across its lip, back and forth, back and forth. Castiel thinks of the Impala’s windshield wipers, battling an invisible storm.

There’s a lump in his throat. “What you’re doing,” he says, “even just sitting here having a cup of coffee, is a — Herculean feat. I can’t imagine the willpower it’s taking to keep Michael imprisoned. Are you really — _ fine?_”

It’s a ludicrous word for it; they both know it. When Dean meets his eyes, there’s a strange cant to his voice, a roughness and a depth: “I dunno, Cas. But that's what I'm supposed to say, right? ‘I'm fine,’ keep on moving? That's what we all say.”

“No, Dean.” Castiel shakes his head.

He’s mustering his argument, trying to figure out where to push, but — he doesn’t need to. Dean’s already nodding, dropping his chin: “Okay.” When he smiles, brief and humorless, it takes the tension a moment to fade from his cheeks.

“There is this pounding.” His eyes meet Cas’s, now, all the raw miserable challenge there: _ see me, then. _ “In my head. It never stops. Michael's in there, and he is fighting _ hard _ to get out.”

It’s nothing Castiel doesn’t know. It breaks his heart all over again just the same.

“And I can’t let my guard down,” says Dean. “Not for a second. I’m barely even sleeping,” and he covers that with a laugh, one more ironic sip from his ultra-caffeinated cup.

“That’s not sustainable,” Castiel points out.

“No — no, it’s probably not.” The weariness is there in every line of Dean’s body, in the color of his voice. “But no point complaining about it. It’s on me.”

Except — Castiel thinks, an idea forming in his mind, one he should have had long ago — that it’s _ not. _

\---

He proposes it that evening — pulling Dean aside with a hand on his arm outside their motel room door.

“I could watch over you,” Castiel says.

For a moment, Dean’s eyes widen; then they turn puzzled, almost polite. “What?”

“In your sleep. I could watch over you, so you can rest.”

“Cas —” Dean looks for a moment like there are more words caught behind his lips, but then he sighs, and looks away. “We’ve talked about this, buddy; that’s creepy. And it’s not like it’ll make much difference, if I wake up and I’m Michael, not me. No offense.”

“None taken.” Castiel bats the question aside. “That’s not what I mean. I could watch over you, _ in _ your sleep — inside your head.”

Dean opens his mouth; frowns, closes it again. His chin jerks as if he’s about to speak, or maybe swallow. After a moment, he sways minutely toward Castiel — once, then again.

Then he swallows properly, looks down, and uses his free hand to gently remove Castiel’s grip from his arm.

It feels like rejection. Castiel does his best to swallow his shame.

“You think that would work?” asks Dean, in a low, toneless voice.

But when Castiel looks up into his eyes, he sees the hope there. The fragile, desperate hope, too raw to hold out into the naked air.

“I think it could,” says Castiel, painstakingly honest; and Dean nods, nods again. Stiffly. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah — yeah, okay. Let’s try.”

\---

The last time Castiel stepped into Dean’s mind, it was with technological assistance — Sam’s passenger on a British Men of Letters-designed ride. The time before that was at Dean’s request: the brutal _ taking _ of information, softened as much as he ever can.

He doesn’t want to hurt Dean, not if he can possibly avoid it.

“Do you need to touch my head,” asks Dean, “like last time, or —”

“Your hand should be fine,” Castiel interrupts. He’s been thinking about this, and he’s pretty sure it should work. “Or — possibly your shoulder.”

He sees Dean startle at that — glance down toward his right bicep, where the two-pronged scar still lingers, concealed by the sleeve of his shirt.

“The other one,” Castiel clarifies, and Dean goes still.

Castiel knows they’re both remembering it. Or — he’s not sure _ what _ Dean remembers, even now, of the flight from Hell, but he knows Dean remembers his handprint. Can hear Dean’s voice, ringing down the years: _ well, he didn’t touch me _there.

Dean’s throat bobs, and he lies back on top of the covers, sliding his sleeve up to expose his left shoulder.

It’s clean now, bare of scars, but Castiel can remember where he touched Dean — can remember it like a brand seared on his own soul.

“Try to relax,” he advises, reaching out to settle his hand along the invisible contours. Dean’s skin is smooth under his palm, and cooler than Castiel expected. Dimly, he can feel a heartbeat. “Do — whatever you normally do, when you fall asleep."

Dean laughs, a low rumble that’s half humor and half unease. His muscles are locked with tension. “You have no idea how this works for humans, do you?”

“It’s been some time,” Castiel admits. He keeps his voice low and calm, hoping the cadence will help ease Dean toward relaxation. “I did struggle with insomnia in my time as a human, though.”

“Yeah?” Dean’s eyes are squeezed shut, and his voice sounds distant. “What’d you do, count sheep?”

Castiel dips his chin, and smiles. He hears Dean’s breath hitch, and when he looks up, Dean’s eyes are open again, lingering on his face.

“No,” he admits. He strokes a thumb over the ridge of Dean’s collarbone, where it meets his shoulder, because it seems like the thing to do. His free hand feels awkward, so he moves it, tangling with Dean’s fingers. “But I did try counting fish, from time to time.”

Dean’s still watching him. Castiel keeps moving his thumb, rhythmic, soothing, as Dean’s eyelids droop further and further; as Dean sighs and settles into the bedspread; as Dean drops, at long, exhausted last, into sleep.

\---

Castiel is back in Rocky’s bar.

He blinks for a moment, getting his bearings. There’s still blood spattered across the room, stools in disarray; Pamela’s body lies sightless behind the bar. The very air is shivering, trembling under impact, and when he turns, the door of the walk-in cooler is shaking in its frame.

Dean’s sitting in front of it, back braced against the thudding, arms around his knees.

Castiel goes to him.

Dean stirs, and this is a Dean hidden from him even in daylight; his eyes are raw and red with weariness, and there’s a tremor in his hands as he uncrosses them. He looks up at Castiel like he’s not sure he’s real.

“Cas?”

“It’s me.” Castiel drops to his knees in front of him, taking his hands; this Dean looks almost like a child, curled in on himself, but his knuckles are as large and rough as ever, his face as lined.

“I wasn’t sure you were coming,” Dean mumbles. “Has it been —”

“Only a few seconds,” Castiel promises. “Dean, I’m sorry."

Dean pulls a hand free to rub his eyes. “‘S'okay. He just — won’t stop.”

Castiel glances at the door behind him. It bangs even louder; the screwdriver holding it closed trembles, but holds.

“No,” he agrees, “but we don’t have to stay here. Come on. Let’s go somewhere you can rest.”

Dean hesitates. He starts to his feet; then glances back at the door. “Do you think it’s — safe?”

“I’ll keep watch,” Castiel promises, again. “I’ll let you know if anything starts to give. Dean — please let me help you. _ Please._”

He sees Dean gather himself, slowly. Sees all the internal architecture — the self-confidence and the memory and the belief — that he needs to assemble, before he can hoist his body up onto it, square his shoulders and stand on his own two feet.

Dean meets Castiel’s eyes, and it’s _ his _ Dean: exhausted and without pretense, but his _ . _ The one he knows with all his heart.

“Do you trust me?” Castiel asks, softly.

And Dean smiles. Just a little. Like he knows something secret, like Castiel’s still two steps behind.

“Yeah, Cas,” he says.

\---

Castiel doesn’t mean to take them anywhere in particular — not really.

He isn’t thinking in specifics. He wants somewhere Dean can feel safe, at home, and the bunker presents itself, but the bunker is — _ full of strangers, _ these days, in Dean’s words. And besides, Dean didn’t dream of the bunker, when he built a safe place in his own mind _ . _ He dreamed of something of his own; something _ more. _

Maybe it’s that thought — _ something more _— that brings Castiel where he goes.

It’s something more of himself. 

It’s the fishing dream, but it’s not the fishing dream. The dock is recognizable, the gentle water lapping at its posts, but beyond that —

Beyond that is _ everything. _

It’s all his dreams and poems, all tumbled together. The cliffs and the streams and the mangrove swamp, spilling out along the water’s edge; seas of eelgrass; coral reefs. Islands rise on the horizon, jellyfish blooming around them, and Castiel can sense still more, swirling on and on out of sight. _ The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas. _ Fish are leaping, birds calling. Somewhere distant, music threads the air.

Dean pulls away from him, stumbling slightly, and stares.

Humiliation heats Castiel’s cheeks. “I’m sorry. I —”

Dean cuts him off. “I know this place.”

He’s revolving slowly on the spot, boards creaking under his shoes. And it’s true; the oak trees still lean close, here at the water’s edge. Castiel’s feet are still planted where he once stood, and handed Dean an address, and stated his intent to rebel — the very first time.

“Cas,” says Dean, “what —”

Castiel tries to speak, but his throat won’t sound.

Dean crouches to lean over the edge of the dock, peering past the water’s surface. He stares, for a long minute. “There’s fish here I’ve never seen.”

_ Please stop, _ Castiel asks the dream, closing his eyes. _ I didn’t intend him to see all this. I don’t want to — overwhelm him, to force conversations that aren’t — _

He opens his eyes, and the oarfish is trembling there in the shallows, raising its alien head to brush the crest of its fin with Dean’s hand.

Its eyes are small and unreadable, shining like uncrumpled foil in its strange face. The red of its fin is just as bright as Castiel remembers; the strange marks on its side, just as dark and obscure. _ Would you like to be a portent? _ he remembers asking, so many centuries ago.

Dean stays very still, letting the oarfish nose its curious face into his palm. When it sinks away again, he raises his hand to study it, briefly — as though he might be changed.

He lowers his hand as he rises, and Castiel at last finds words. “I’m sorry,” he says, out loud. “I’ve been — visiting this place, sometimes; my intention must have bled over into this iteration somehow. I apologize; I know it’s your —”

Dean’s staring at him with something fierce and unknowable in his eyes. “Why?”

Castiel’s words die in his chest. He can’t breathe. The music is only louder: _ Many times I’ve gazed along the open road — _

“Cas,” says Dean, “why?”

_ Many times I’ve lied, and many times I’ve listened. _

Castiel says, “I used to — to read poetry here. To fish.”

Dean makes an urgent, desolate sound in his throat, and steps twice forward, and kisses him.

\---

For a moment, Castiel feels only shock.

He’s been thinking about this for so long — dreaming, for so long — that the reality seems to split him in two. There is the Castiel he knows, always waiting, always wondering, and there is this one: with Dean’s mouth on his mouth and Dean’s fist in the folds of his trenchcoat and Dean’s music swelling all around him, filling the air and fizzing down the lines of his ribs.

He realizes, after a moment, that Dean might expect him to reciprocate, and so he tries — clumsy, inexpert. He’s done this before, but he’s forgotten everything he’s ever known. None of it matters in the face of _ this one, _ this man, here in the arms Castiel has wrapped around him somehow.

“Cas,” gasps Dean, breaking free, “you fucking _ idiot._”

“I’m sorry,” says Castiel humbly, looking down. “I know I’ve done this before, but I’m not very —”

“Not _ that,_” Dean groans, and his fingers find enough hair at the nape of Castiel’s neck to pull his head up again — to slot their mouths together. Only after a moment of that, Dean’s drawing back, twisting like he can’t figure out how to stay close and find room to speak at the same time: “Is this — okay? I’m not —”

“_Dean,_” says Castiel, and kisses him, by some strange twist of dream-logic, right down onto the boards of the dock.

When he pulls back, Dean’s eyes are reflecting the sky. The sky is reflecting the water. Robert Plant is still singing: _ Many dreams come true, and some have silver linings. I live for my dream and a pocket full of gold. _

He’s abruptly aware of his body — of Dean’s. Still physical, here; still themselves. He’s got his arms braced on either side of Dean’s head, his knee between his legs; trenchcoat falling all around them, as if it might be enough to shelter them both from the world.

There’s a smile spreading on Dean’s face. Slow, incredulous, melting into something else; his eyes travel appreciatively over Castiel’s face. His shoulders, his chest.

“You know,” he says, mouth tilting, “there’s one thing that usually helps me get a good night’s sleep. I mean, if you’re game.”

Castiel pauses to check. In some distant part of Dean’s dreamscape, the locked door shudders away — but it shows no signs of giving. It will hold.

“I will always be game for you, Dean Winchester,” he agrees gravely, and lets Dean pull him down by his tie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems and songs quoted in this chapter include:
> 
> Edith Södergran, "Dangerous Dreams"  
Langston Hughes, "The Dream Keeper"  
William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”  
Led Zeppelin "Over the Hills and Far Away"


	12. The Nightingale's Northern Limit

There is one moment — exactly one — when bliss seizes Castiel so absolutely that under it opens a yawning pit of panic. _ What if the Empty comes? _

But it doesn’t. And after, Dean sleeps, there in his arms, cheek pillowed against the rough wood of the dock like it’s the softest bed in the world.

\---

As always in their lives, heartbreak follows quickly.

They move softly around each other, the next morning, keep laughing when they catch or avoid each other’s eyes. The hum of the Impala’s engine feels like Dean pressing a hand to Castiel’s thigh.

But then, there’s the hunt for the gorgon, the fight; Dean’s head slamming again and again into a solid doorframe. Castiel watches, helpless and paralyzed, from the floor. And after, when Dean won’t wake up —

Sam takes Baby’s wheel. It’s an eight-hour highway home; she devours it in six. Castiel holds Dean across his lap in the backseat and tries, again and again, to heal him — to see inside his head.

Nothing works.

“He _ will _ wake up,” Castiel tells Jack, later, in the quiet of his bedroom. He doesn’t say: _ Because I don’t know what I will do if he doesn’t. Because I will be cursed to live forever, with my joy gone from this world. _

Dean wakes up.

Michael does, too.

And Jack kills him — kills him amongst the bunker in carnage, and burns and burns and burns away his soul.

\---

That night, they build a mass pyre in the back lot, last summer’s soccer field. Its flames blaze fifty feet or more into the starless sky. The four of them stand and watch as their friends’ bodies turn dark with soot, then lose all form in the flames.

Sam goes inside around two in the morning. Jack follows not long after, leaving Dean and Castiel to watch the logs burn down, standing silent at the edge of the firelight’s glow.

“Gonna ask me how I’m doing, Cas?” says Dean, after a while. His face reveals nothing; he doesn’t take his eyes from the flames.

“I was considering it,” Castiel admits.

“I’m damn relieved.” His lips are barely moving, voice almost inaudible in the crackle of firewood. “I know I should feel guilty, and I do, but — I’m damn relieved he’s dead.”

Castiel looks down. Dean’s hand is trembling; the only part of his body that’s moving at all. He catches Castiel’s gaze and draws it up, abruptly; curls it into a fist — then drops it again, like a mask that’s not worth wearing anymore.

Castiel reaches out. He takes Dean’s hand and laces their fingers together. They stand there for a long time, watching the pyre burn down, until dawn streaks the sky as gray as the ashes on the ground.

\---

_ It takes time for normalcy to return. _ That is what a story about their lives would say; Castiel has enough novels living in his head to know the tune. It’s always struck him as odd, because the Winchesters never defer normalcy — they race toward it, cling to it like the only safe thing in the world.

Sam is sitting at the library table, laptop open, when Dean and Castiel come inside. “Got a hunt,” he says, eyes still on the screen; then he’s snapping it closed, rising out of his seat. “Cas, would you mind keeping an eye on Jack while we’re gone? Make sure he’s — you know.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says Dean. He’s standing close to Castiel; their hands could touch, if they wanted them to. “Man — I haven’t _ slept _. Give a guy a chance to catch his breath before tearing off to — where, exactly?”

Sam glances between them. “Biloxi.” His voice is mild — blameless, dismissive. “I’m good to drive.”

So they go, and that’s the last Castiel sees of Sam and Dean — aside from a twenty-minute stop to resupply ammo five days later — for nearly two weeks.

Dean calls, though. At odd hours, voice rough with exhaustion — sometimes with a question about the lore, others just to report how things are going. That they’re still alive. Jack and Castiel spend long hours in the library, tracking down spells for a tricky hunt involving voodoo and zombies, and Jack starts reading up extensively on Haitian death-magic. Castiel can’t tell whether it’s natural curiosity or cause for concern.

“Hey, Cas,” says Dean, one day on the phone, cutting himself off mid-sentence. His voice is quiet, almost furtive, and he adds, “Kid’s not there, is he?”, before: “You don’t think you could — do that thing you did, before Michael — like, could you still get into my dream?”

Castiel blinks, startled. “I — yes, of course, though I couldn’t bring _ you _there. You’d have to be dreaming of that place of your own accord.”

He can hear Dean swallow, audibly, over the line. “Yeah, not a problem,” he says, in a voice that sounds only half like himself.

Castiel frowns. “Dean, is everything all right?”

Dean laughs at that. “Yeah. Yeah, I just — miss you, is all.”

\---

When Castiel goes, he finds Dean waiting for him.

He’s pacing at the very end of the dock, hands in his pockets, eyes on the water. Castiel doesn’t make a sound, as he arrives, but he hears Dean’s intake of breath — sees his eyes widen as he turns.

“There are more colors,” he says, “when you’re here.”

He immediately colors himself, a blush rising in his cheeks, and Castiel doesn’t know how he gets there but then he’s standing at the end of the dock too, hands on Dean’s hips, shoulders, ribs. Dean’s fists are clenching in his trenchcoat, pulling it tight across the small of his back. “I missed you,” Castiel says, and it’s into Dean’s mouth; it feels so good, impossibly good. Dean’s hand curls around the back of his neck, and they’re kissing.

Castiel can’t stop touching. Can’t believe he’s allowed to touch. His hands work under Dean’s t-shirt, his flannel, and Dean shivers, but it’s not from cold. Castiel’s fingertips skim Dean’s sides, his thumbs orbit broad strokes along the wings of Dean’s ribcage, and he thinks he could do this — just this — for eternity. He thinks: _ he’s thinner, a little. _ He says, in a gap of air: “Are you eating?”

“Trying to,” Dean mumbles. He drops his head, and he’s kissing down the side of Castiel’s neck; working his trenchcoat half off his shoulders for access to more skin. “Sammy’s all hell for leather right now, haven’t got him into a sit-down place for days.”

“He needs a break.” Castiel pushes Dean’s flannel off his shoulders, dips his thumbs behind Dean’s belt loops to feel him gasp. “You both do.”

“Gonna drag him home after this one if I have to knock his ass out and stuff him in the trunk,” Dean promises, and that’s the last they talk about Sam for a while.

\---

They’re shy of each other, in the waking world. It feels different, trading looks or touches in the intimacy of the bunker — knowing someone might walk in at any time. _ Soon as I get in my own bed, I’m gonna sleep ‘til the cows come home, _ Dean promises Castiel, the last night they spend together on the road, and Castiel understands: Dean needs rest, real rest, uninterrupted by — whatever it is they’ve been doing.

So he makes the logical offer: to step into Dean’s shoes for a while. The next hunt that sends Sam whirling out of the bunker, it’s Castiel in the passenger seat beside him — Dean at home with Jack. _ Talk to him. Get him to open up, _ Castiel insists, and for all Dean’s doubts, he does. They sit side by side on the dock while Dean tells him about Donatello, his lack of obvious cause for concern.

When he’s done, Dean eyes the water. “There’s not anything in here that’ll try and eat me, right?”

“You should be safe,” says Castiel. “It’s your dream.”

Dean fixes him in a suspicious stare. “Yeah. Exactly.”

That forces Castiel to laugh. “It’s also _ my _dream. I won’t let them.”

And so Dean strips off his shoes and socks and rolls up his jeans to the calf, fusses at Castiel until he does the same. “It’s what you’re _ supposed _ to do, when you’re sitting on a dock in a lake in Arkansas,” he says. “If this even is still Arkansas.”

Castiel has to admit it feels nice. The water is cool around his toes. Dean swings his feet and takes Castiel’s hand with a prickly sort of determination, then says: “So. How’s the hunt?”

Castiel laughs. “It’s been — interesting.”

He tells Dean about Charming Acres, the town that time forgot. About Ms. Dowling’s boarding house and Conrad’s letters from Sunny — about the _ shape _ and _ heft _ of Conrad’s —

“Jesus, _ Jesus Christ, _ shut up,” says Dean, cheeks flaming, and Castiel feels wicked and answers, “Why? It didn’t sound superior to yours —”

Which is how he finds himself being dunked in his own fish pond, laughter streaming out of his mouth in big round bubbles of air. When he surfaces, his trench coat is sodden and flapping at his sides. There’s water in his nose; it stings. He drips eloquently for a moment, feeling mud in his shoes. Then he declares, “You’re scaring my _ fish,_” and hauls Dean in after him.

The next night, there’s more to say, about Sam’s adventures in a cardigan; about martinis and Chip Harrington and his daughter Sunny, the fight in the ice cream shop, Sam’s angel blade hovering perilously close to his face. Dean laughs at all the right parts, but after he reaches to touch Cas’s cheek. Just briefly, almost involuntary, like he can see where the blade might have pierced his skin.

Castiel reads him a poem, later. Lies with his head pillowed against the soft stretch of skin between Dean’s ribs and his hip and recites:

“_In the green midnight by the nightingale’s northern limit. Heavy leaves hang in a trance, the deaf cars rush toward the neon line. The nightingale’s voice doesn’t step aside; it’s as piercing as a crowing rooster, but pleasant and without conceit. I was in prison and it visited me. I was sick and it visited me. I didn’t notice it then, but I do now. Time flows down from the sun and moon and into all the tick tock tick thankful clocks. But right here time doesn’t exist. Just the nightingale’s voice, those raw ringing notes that whet the night-sky’s bright scythe._”

It comes true as he speaks it: the darkness falling, the crescent moon, the distant sound of traffic. Foliage rustles all around them. The nightingale emerges from what used to be a sycamore; now, Castiel’s not sure what it is. He’s not sure if Dean’s ever heard a nightingale before — if his brief experiment with trans-Atlantic travel left any time for listening to birds.

“That’s nice,” says Dean sleepily. He’s got his head pillowed on a balled up flannel, eyes drifting closed. “What’s it mean?”

Castiel considers this. “A thousand different things, I’m sure,” he says at last. “To me it means that —”

He stops short. _ I was in prison and it visited me. I was sick and it visited me. _ He has been trying to make it to this place, this moment, for so very long.

“It means that poetry is always there, whether you see it or not,” he says finally. “Also, humanity. Also love.”

Dean doesn’t answer. When Castiel cranes his neck to look at him, his chin is tilted to the side, eyes closed. His face looks soft and childlike — unlined.

Castiel smiles. He kisses his own fingertips, then reaches up to brush them gently across Dean’s cheek.

\---

The next time he’s home is the first time they share a bed in the real world.

The promise of it is in the air between them from the moment Castiel first sets foot on the stair. He can feel Dean’s eyes on him, hear the tight swallow in the silence. Dean’s hand flexes against his thigh as if it’s work not to reach out and touch.

“I heard you wore a cardigan,” Dean tells Sam, his lips fighting a smile.

Castiel sighs. “Yes, I told him about the cardigan,” he says, in answer to Sam’s look of betrayal. And, with a quelling look at Dean: “Where’s Jack?”

Jack is in his room. Castiel will just stop there briefly, speak with him and wish him well. Then — then, if Sam and Dean are done talking, if Dean’s ready to adjourn to somewhere private —

When he reaches the doorway, Jack is standing with his back turned, lifting his pet snake out of its enclosure. “Cas says you miss your friend.”

Castiel pauses, watching, and finds that he’s smiling helplessly. They have raised this child — this impossible, beautiful, generous, troubled child.

“Sam and Dean would help you. So I’ll help you,” says Jack. “I’ll help you see your friend again. In Heaven.”

The snake is ash in his hands.

Alarm tightens Castiel’s lungs.

But movement catches his eye at the far end of the corridor. Dean, wide-eyed, hands flat and nervous at his thighs. His throat bobs as he swallows, but that’s possibility dancing in his gaze — in the quirk of his chin toward his bedroom. The question.

There will be time to talk to Jack later.

The man Castiel loves is asking for him, and he goes.

It’s the same and different, here in the immediacy of their lives. Shy and wondering and instinctive, urgent — Dean hauling him in by the loops of his belt. Dean dropping onto his own bed to watch as Castiel shoulders off his trenchcoat, toes out of his shoes. Dean’s pupils blow wide when Castiel loosens his tie, one-handed, and when Castiel raises an eyebrow at him he’s suddenly off the bed again, sinking to his knees with a low sound of _ need _aching its way out of his throat.

Castiel tries to keep his balance. He cradles Dean’s skull in both hands, running his fingertips ceaselessly through the soft stubble of his hair. With a thumb, he traces the line of Dean’s eyebrow, his cheekbone; two fingertips test the hollow of his cheek.

Dean makes another sound in his throat and leans into Castiel’s touch, as much as he can. His eyes are closed, and then they’re open, gazing up the length of Castiel’s body to his face. Castiel’s hips stutter, and Dean slides closer and watches him come undone.

Afterward, Castiel returns the favor. He knows he’s inexpert at this, but it doesn’t seem to matter when he has Dean on his back in the bed, legs splayed wide and thighs quivering, sweat gleaming in the hollow of his throat. “Cas,” he keeps saying, “_Cas,_” voice almost breaking out of its whisper, and then —

A knock on the door; the knob rattles. Both their gazes dart to the chair propped against it. “Dean,” comes Sam’s voice, “have you seen Cas?”

Dean’s mouth gapes for a moment, soundlessly, like a fish. “No,” he manages, finally, only a little strangled. “He’s probably — reading, or something.”

Silence, for a moment, then, rich with choked-back laughter: “You busy in there? You left your laptop in the library, I didn’t think you had the _ imagination _ —”

Dean’s hand scrabbles on the nightstand. He throws the first thing it finds — a book — and it thumps loudly against the door. Sam’s footsteps recede down the corridor with an accompaniment of cackling, and Castiel dips his head and curls his tongue in a way that makes Dean say, “_Shit,_” and his hips try to leave the bed.

In the aftermath, they lie there together, sticky and lazy and replete. “It’s not that I don’t ever want Sammy to know,” Dean says. “It’s just —”

Castiel thinks of his deal with the Empty, and understands. Some things feel like fantasies; like you might lose them the moment you believe they’re real.

He thinks of Jack’s snake. The disquiet that’s been chafing under his ribs works its way up his throat. He should tell Dean.

Tell him what?

No. He’ll talk to Jack. Figure something else out before he lets the Winchesters worry about it.

He turns his head to put his nose in Dean’s hair, and leaves the problem for tomorrow.

\---

Two mornings later, Castiel slides out of bed before dawn.

Dean turns over and mutters something interrogative into his pillow, a question or maybe a complaint — “_Whereyougon’?_”

Castiel stoops to kiss him. Dean turns his face up into it, long and lingering, and when Castiel draws back, he opens his eyes.

_ I’m going to find God, _ Castiel thinks. It’s the right path; he’s more and more certain. Jack’s never met his grandfather. Perhaps God will help him.

And it makes sense. Jack’s body contains both a grace and a soul. For all his long life, Castiel has been instructed that the two are anathema; that angels must be warriors, obedient, unswayed by emotion or doubt. And all his long life, he has strayed — drawn in by humanity in its endless, beautiful forms.

But God created angels, and God created humans. Souls are His work — not Naomi’s, not Zachariah’s, not Lucifer’s, not Michael’s. He alone will know what to do about Jack’s.

He might also have an answer to the question burning in the depths of Castiel’s heart:

_ Did I have a soul, when I was human? Where is it now? If I lost my grace again — if I fell by choice — would I get to keep it? _

_ Would the Empty have any hold on me then? _

“I have an errand to run,” he tells Dean. “A few days, maybe.”

Dean struggles up onto his elbows, and Castiel sees doubt and trust chase each other across his face. “Is it dangerous?”

Castiel considers. “I don’t think so.”

He sees it: the moment trust wins. It’s dazzling, a miniature light that blooms warm and startled in Dean’s eyes. Castiel doesn’t think either of them fail to wonder at it — after so many years and so many trials, they’re here.

“Come home safe,” Dean says, and pulls Castiel down for one more kiss, and lets him go.

\---

God doesn’t answer.

\---

It shouldn’t surprise Castiel.

It shouldn’t surprise him, or disappoint him, because God has _ never _ answered his call. Those long years Castiel sought him, prayed for him, tried to step into his shoes — or those centuries of obedience, faith in a higher plan. God was never there, except for when he chose to be; why should he be here now?

_ Because there is a child. A child who needs him. _ But railing at absent fathers has never once saved their sons.

Castiel visits Dean’s dreams. Avoids talk of where he is and what he’s been doing, and he sees Dean’s forehead furrow, sometimes, with the question, then let it go.

He’s on his way back to the bunker when he gets the voicemail: Dean’s voice, strained in its effort to sound neutral. _ Hey, Cas. Have you, uh — heard from Jack? It’s just — some pretty big shit just went down, Nick was trying to raise _ Lucifer _ apparently, and the kid said he stopped it, but he and Mom aren’t back at the bunker yet, and — _

There’s a pause, a stutter of breath. Then: _ Sammy nearly bit it this time, man, I was scared out of my fucking mind. _

Another long pause. _ I mean he’s fine. And Jack and Mom probably are too, just — call me, all right? _

Castiel pulls off on the side of the road, and calls.

“Hey, Cas.” Dean sounds wound-tight but not terrified; his voice suggests there’s someone else in the room. Castiel closes his eyes for an instant; he can visualize the line between Dean’s eyebrows. Wishes he could reach out and touch it, smooth it away.

“I got your message,” he says, instead. “Nick was trying to raise Lucifer?”

“Yeah.”

_ First things first; _ address the threat. “Where is he now?”

“I don’t, uh —” Dean clears his throat. “Kid said he took care of him. So, right now we’re just trying to find Jack and Mom.”

Misgiving settles in Castiel’s gut. “Are they together?”

“Yeah.”

He should have said something. The word catches in his throat: “Alone?”

“Yeah — why do you —” Dean stops short, and Castiel can hear the fear and impatience blending in his voice. “Yes, Cas, they were together, alone.”

It’s probably nothing. It’s probably fine.

A struggling two-year-old nephilim, missing some or all of his soul, confronted by his abusive father and the man whose face he wore —

“Cas?”

He owes it to Dean to share what he knows. Whether it matters or not. “I, um,” he tries.

“If you have something to tell us, now’s the time.” There’s no patience in Dean’s tone, no room for affection.

Castiel swallows. “I saw Jack. He — he did something, when I got home with Sam. I went to check on him, and Felix was sick.”

“Felix.” He can practically see Dean’s incredulous blink. “You mean the snake?”

“Yes,” says Castiel, forging on. “Jack used his powers. He killed the snake. I think Jack considered it — a mercy? I — I was going to tell you, but —”

It might not _ mean anything. _ But Castiel can still feel the slow horror of that moment: Jack’s eyes, raised to an imaginary heaven; the ash flowing out of his hands.

“You just wanted to wait until we were _ already _ freaked out,” Dean says, his voice a taut leash.

“I’m sorry,” Castiel says, like he always says, like he will always say, forever. “I don’t think Jack is well, Dean.” And: “Dean —”

But the call’s gone dead. Castiel stares down at his phone.

He can’t stop thinking: _ He trusted me. He let me go. For this. _

\---

He spends the long midnight ride running the words through his head. The apology, the explanation. _ I believed in Jack for so long. I knew that he would be good for the world. He was good for _us.

None of them feel like enough, if Mary is gone.

The house is old and ramshackle, illuminated piece by piece in Castiel’s headlights. There’s a rusting pickup parked out front, the Impala beside it.

The door creaks as he lets himself in.

Nick’s body lies on the floor, one mangled hand protruding from the blanket that covers it. “Cas,” says Sam. “We looked around. No sign of Jack or Mom. There's a, um, blast site behind the house. It looks angelic, just bigger.”

_ What he did, with the snake — it wasn't malice, or evil. It was the _ absence _ of good. I saw that in him. But we were a family, and I didn't want to lose that. _

Dean is standing with his back turned to the door; he half pivots. Enough for Castiel to see his face in profile — see the splintering iron in his jaw. He speaks more to the wall than to Sam or Castiel. “Might have been Lucifer. Nick was trying to bring him back.”

_ I thought I could fix it on my own. It felt like my responsibility. So I left, and I — failed you. I failed Jack. I failed Mary. _

“If he did something to her,” says Dean, “if she is —“

His voice grates, a rusted spring wound too tight to hold. Castiel swallows. _ I am so — I am so — _

“— then _ you’re _dead to me,” says Dean, wheeling to meet Cas’s eyes for the first time since he walked in the room.

His face is white and terrible, an etching in fear. His words strike out like a blow, but Castiel’s heart clenches in answer — an ache too sweet for language. _ I love you, _ Castiel wants to tell him. _ I love you, I love you, it will be okay _ — except that he can’t promise that.

So he gives his answer instead. His explanation. His apology. “If I could go back and just — talk to him right there, I would. But I can’t, Dean. I failed you. And I failed Jack. And I failed —”

“No,” says Dean. “Don’t even say it. Don’t even say her name.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems quoted in this chapter include:
> 
> Tomas Tranströmer, "The Nightingale in Badelunda"


	13. Losing Farther, Losing Faster

Mary is dead.

Castiel paces the dock of the fishing pond, alone. In the past, his dark moods have bloomed in this place, drenched the water and shadowed the sky. Today, he can’t let them. Today, in case Dean comes —

_ There are more colors when you’re here. _ He holds them, gentle: a pale sunrise in the sky, sheeting the water gold. Insects skating circles on its surface. The muted splash of a surfacing fish, the warm-cool breeze of a new day.

Dean doesn’t come. He doesn’t come the next night, either, or the next, after the hunters’ memorial; he doesn’t look Castiel in the eye.

Then he tries to lock Jack in the tomb he built for himself. “He’s just another monster,” he snaps, blazing, and Castiel is —

_ Done. _

\---

It is a strange thing, to love and hate someone at the same time.

For ten years, Castiel has ordered his life by Dean Winchester. For five, he has understood why. Now —

He drives two hours from the bunker before he stops for gas. It’s late, the moon sinking low. Oily puddles reflect faint rainbows under the Gas-n-Sip’s fluorescent lights. Across the prairie, dawn toys with the horizon.

Jack is out there somewhere. Alone and afraid.

The scent of gasoline fills Castiel’s synapses. What would it be, he wonders, to live without Dean on purpose? Not because Dean’s gone, or dead, or possessed by Michael; not because Dean’s sent Castiel away. Because —

_ I never wanted to put him in that damn box. I wanted him dead! _

Castiel’s hands are shaking on the pump.

He would never be able to smell gasoline or motor oil without thinking of Dean. Never hear music. He could never watch the sunrise, or the ripple of water, or rest his own hands on his thighs without thinking of Dean’s there. Dean, full of love and too frightened to give it away.

Castiel finishes pumping his gas. Climbs back into the cab of the truck. For a moment, he sets his hands on the steering wheel and just lets them rest.

He is tired — so tired.

He misses Mary. They’ve all lost so much.

When he closes his eyes, it isn’t hard to get there — by now the dream is always waiting, just below his surfaces. He shutters it, gently. Tidies away the stray creatures of ocean deeps and wild coastlines and coral reefs. Smooths the cliffs and the rocky streams. He spreads silt through the depths and lets it settle, a hanging curtain, to the bottom of the lake.

When he’s done, he stands on the dock and looks around. It’s as it was the first time he ever came here — the day he found Dean peaceful and alone. 

Is that a shadow of movement in the water, some ancient creature waiting to be hauled onto land?

No; it’s a trick of the light. Castiel swallows, and offers words a poet ached to believe.

“_The art of losing isn’t hard to master; _  
_ so many things seem filled with the intent _  
_ to be lost that their loss is no disaster. _

_ Lose something every day. Accept the fluster _  
_ of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. _  
_ The art of losing isn’t hard to master. _

_ Then practice losing farther, losing faster: _  
_ places, and names, and where it was you meant _  
_ to travel. None of these will bring disaster. _

_ I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or _  
_ next-to-last, of three loved houses went. _  
_ The art of losing isn’t hard to master. _

_ I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, _  
_ some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. _  
_ I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster._”

He swallows. His cadence breaks, but so does the poet’s.

“_— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture _  
_ I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident _  
_ the art of losing’s not too hard to master _  
_ though it may look like _(Write _ it!) like disaster._”

That’s it. The poem’s done.

Castiel blinks blurry stars from his eyes, and they resolve into streetlights. He turns the key in his truck’s ignition. And he drives.

\---

The loneliness of the open road has never felt so profound, or so free. For a while, Castiel just sets his foot to the gas pedal and lets go. Highways curve into highways; the landscape changes as it grows light. He flits by towns. Cities take longer, rising half-seen around him and subsiding again into fields of corn.

He curbs the thoughts that creep on him, the inevitable map of his experience to Dean’s: _ after Sam left for Stanford, Dean spent weeks like this. Him and the Impala and the open road, little destination or none until Dad called with instructions, but time to himself for the first time in his life — time to read books and watch what he wanted on TV — _

No. Castiel isn’t here to torture himself.

He needs a plan; he needs to find Jack before the hunters do. They can go on the run together. Castiel will keep him safe. Another continent, maybe. Less danger and fewer reminders.

What if Jack loses control again — hurts someone else? They could go to the wilderness somewhere. But no; Jack’s still a child. He needs to be surrounded by people. He needs family. Love.

If only there were a way to mitigate his powers — make sure it’s safe. Castiel can heal an injury, but he can’t bring back the dead. He can’t repair someone who’s been atomized from existence.

They could extract Jack’s grace, but they’ve already seen the illness that follows from that. If he could keep his powers, but dampen them —

The solution leaves him suddenly breathless. Crowley did this, once: studied the Cage and built it into Lucifer’s bloodstream, his bones. Perhaps there’s a way to keep Jack’s power tamed but still let him move freely — live his life in the world.

Maybe they can even bring the Winchesters around, once they’ve proven it works. Dean — Dean might not like it, but Sam —

Maybe they could stay.

Castiel swerves his truck across the median, ignoring the blare of a semi’s horn. His tires bump and roll on the hummocky grass, then screech when they make contact with pavement again, fishtailing — and he’s straightening out, shooting forward, tearing down the highway, back the way he came.

\---

The back door to Hell is in an alley he remembers, guarded by a demon behind a door.

She has an irritating sense of humor. She peers at him through a window that shows little more than her eyes. They flick to black. “From what I remember,” she drawls, “you’ve _ been _to Hell. More than once.”

The fire of Dean’s soul filling him; demon hands grasping for his wings. “Well, this is different,” Castiel tells her. “I need time to see the Cage and study it.”

“Yeah,” says the demon, “that’s a no.”

She slams the narrow window shut. “Don’t —” Castiel starts, but it’s too late.

She’s gone. 

He stands there furious — useless. He could break down the door, _ make _ her take him. But he needs time, and secrecy. Cooperation. He needs to go unnoticed. 

There’s nothing for him here.

“Wow. Yeah,” says a voice behind him. “You guys are _ screwed._”

Castiel turns around. 

It’s God.

\---

For a moment, Castiel’s own prayers rush through him, long deferred. _ God… I don't know where you are. I don't know if you can hear me. _

He’s here. That means he heard.

_ But please. Sam, Dean — we need you. Please. _

It’s been a long time since Castiel’s seen his father, and longer since he called him that, even in his own mind. It strikes him as strange, for the first time, that in crying out for his own father, the names he invokes are Sam and Dean’s.

Not Jack’s. Not his own.

God looks small. Dapper, in a way that’s unfamiliar: a red blazer, dark jeans. Castiel remembers Chuck as a schlubby writer, but he’s not burying himself in that persona anymore. There’s a gleam of power in his eyes, in the corner of his smile.

He doesn’t seem kind.

“You called me?” he says, and Castiel doesn’t believe it; that isn’t why God is here. None of it matches. The arrogance in his face, the hint of amusement. He’s here because —

“Jack,” says Chuck. “He’s a problem.”

_ He’s your grandson. _

But that’s not it either. Not quite.

“Well.” Chuck claps his hands. “What say you we go find Sam and Dean? Get this party started?”

Before Castiel can protest — _ they don’t want me. they don’t want to save Jack. I don’t want to see them — _ God snaps his fingers, and they’re gone.

\---

They rematerialize into a whirlwind of chaos.

Castiel blinks. This is hardly where he would have expected to find Dean — it’s a sleek, modern office, a dozen glossy desks in open rows. Right now, though, the employees are clambering over them. Screaming at each other. Paper is flying everywhere. “I hate everyone!” chants a man at his desk, while a woman on the floor sobs, “_I just want to be loved —_”

“Oh, that’s right,” says Chuck. “Forgot to tell you — there’s a whole ‘no lying’ thing going on just now. Kid’s work. I wouldn’t recommend trying; it probably affects angels too.”

Castiel stares across the pandemonium, wordless.

“See, this is why people need to lie.” Chuck has that look on his face again, like he’s relishing this. “It’s good. Keeps the peace, you know?”

Castiel doesn’t smile. “Seems like an odd stance for — you.”

“Is it? I’m a writer. Lying’s kind of what we do.”

The writers Castiel reads aren’t liars. Fantasists, perhaps, but — they voice truths deeper than the literal. _ Tell all the truth but tell it slant, _ he thinks, recalling Mattie Dickinson.

He doesn’t look at Chuck. “Sam?” he calls instead, striding into the mayhem, and — steeling himself — “Dean?”

A door swings open, and there’s Dean’s face, peering out. “Cas?” he says, and for a moment, his face shines with unguarded relief. “How’d you get here?”

Castiel can’t quite look him in the eye. He’s not sure he wants to. “He brought me,” he says, and steps aside.

Chuck’s face crinkles in that unsettling smile. “Hey, guys.”

Sam, at the desk, stutters half a gasp. Castiel looks down at his feet.

He isn’t watching Dean’s face — not really. But he still knows it well enough to see it go still, out of the corner of his eye. Still and smooth as stone, that middle ground between fear and fury where they’re one and the same, and Dean’s barely there between them at all.

If Chuck notices, he doesn’t show it. He closes the door behind him, theatrically crisp, and paces the length of the table. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s been a while, and I still look — _ pretty _ good.”

Dean circles with him, matching him stride for stride. Sam says, “No, that’s — not what we were thinking.”

Chuck drops into a chair, and Dean goes still, both feet planted. “Where the hell have you been?”

“You know, that’s a funny story,” says Chuck. His gaze is on the ceiling, that faint smile still on his lips. “Reminds me of a song.”

There’s a guitar, suddenly, in his hands. He plucks a note, and another, and Castiel feels all his long-deferred rage come crashing into him. _ This _ is his father, his creator, the being he served for a thousand thousand years — and for what? A folk tune, while the world outside burns?

He’s still reeling under the impact, sucking in a breath, when Dean takes two steps forward and seizes the guitar. He wheels and smashes it — once, twice, three times — on the floor. “Answer the damn question!”

“Don’t!” snaps Chuck, and the command hits Dean like a physical thing. Castiel sees it stop him dead in his tracks.

But Chuck’s smiling again, that smile that makes Castiel’s blood run cold. “It’s a little cramped in here, don’t you think?” he asks, and snaps his fingers again.

\---

Castiel’s first thought, as the bunker resolves around him, is: _ I didn’t think I’d ever be back here again. _

That first goodbye hurt. But this hurts more — it’s comfortable, familiar, but nothing has changed. Not unless God can restore Jack’s soul, and if he can — why hasn’t he? Why isn’t he doing it right now?

Dean still wants Jack dead. Castiel will still die before he lets that happen.

With a snap of Chuck’s fingers, the world can lie again. “Really?” Sam stammers, and Chuck smiles. “I’m God, Sam. Yeah, really. Go ahead. Try it out.”

Sam merely stares. There are no lies ready on Castiel’s tongue; only absolutes. _ I love Dean. I love Jack. One wants to kill the other. _

“Celine Dion rocks,” tries Dean, and Castiel could kiss him, could murder him, could beg him again to understand — if only he weren’t frozen where he stands.

Dean sits. “You’re welcome,” says Chuck, into the blankness of their stares.

It seems to take him a moment to realize he’ll get no thanks. “Look, the point is — the kid did that with two words. What’s next? He sneezes and, whoops, there goes India?”

None of them laugh.

“I don’t know,” says Chuck. “Maybe. But this is bad. Like — _ me _ level bad.”

Castiel can’t ask it. Dean can’t either, by the look on his face. But Sam does: “Can you stop him?”

“Not exactly,” says Chuck. “But you can. With that.”

There’s a gun lying there on the table.

How none of them saw it appear, Castiel doesn’t know; one of the many tricks of godhood. It’s silver and glossy, a pistol that reminds him of Dean’s, and it’s Dean’s hand that reaches for it — settles the grip snug to his palm. Dean, the lifelong weapon: of Castiel’s father, of his own.

There are symbols etched in the metal. They’re in no language Castiel can read.

The magazine slides free when Dean releases it — empty. “There’s no bullets.”

“Right,” says Chuck. “So, this doesn't so much fire bullets as it sends a wave of multi-dimensional energy across a perfectly balanced quantum link between whoever's shooting it and whoever they're shooting at.”

Dean stares. Sam stares. Even Castiel stares, processing — if a multi-dimensional quantum link —

“What?” he says.

Chuck sighs. “Whatever happens to the person you’re shooting at? Also happens to you. So, if you kill him —”

Dean’s face tightens. “You die.” He slides the magazine home.

_ You cannot, _ thinks Castiel, _ you cannot possibly — _

But he can see Dean’s eyes.

He means to do it, with every cell in his body.

Castiel’s voice sounds loud even to his own ears. “I don’t understand why we’re talking about killing Jack. You can fix him. You can — restore his soul.” _ And mine. Do I have a soul? _ “That’s why I called you.”

Chuck winces. “Yeah — not so much.”

“You’re _ God,_” says Sam.

“Well, souls are complicated — even for me. Besides, even if I could, would you really want — I mean, after what he did?”

He’s looking at Dean. He’s looking at Dean, and Dean’s looking back, and Castiel cannot —

He cannot _ take _this. God — Chuck — is one thing; God has been abandoning him for as long as Castiel has lived. But Dean is who he cleaved to, in the darkest nights of his faith.

Dean is the man who went through Hell and came out shining. Who stabbed an angel of the Lord, the first time he saw him; who defied the will of Heaven to save a single town. Who sat on a park bench and let Castiel confess his emotions, his doubts.

Dean loved his brother right through an Apocalypse, when all of fate decreed that one of them must kill the other. But he won’t do the same for Jack.

Castiel cracks. “Then we bind him,” he tries. He heaves a Hail Mary: “We throw him in the Cage, until —”

“Stop, Cas.” Dean won’t meet his eyes. “You heard him. This is the only way.”

_ You coward. _ “And Billie said the only way to defeat Michael was to lock you in a box.”

“I liked the old Death better,” comments Chuck. _ The one Dean killed, for his family. _ “This new Death —” _ the one Castiel killed, for his family — _ “she’s always sticking her scythe where it doesn’t belong.”

“There has to be another way,” says Castiel.

“Well, there’s not.” Dean’s looking at him, now, but his eyes are hard. Pitiless. “Now, I know you don’t like it, and I don’t really care. ‘Cause you just heard it from God himself that this? Is the only thing that can kill Jack.”

He picks up the gun.

_ I have loved you, _ thinks Castiel, _ from the day I raised you. You have been my light home when I am lost. _

He remembers how it felt, his helplessness in the face of it — the overwhelming, naked belief in _ this man, _ his wisecracks and his cynicism and his unflinching sense of wrong and right.

He remembers choosing to rebel, and choosing to rebel again.

_ You taught me better than this, _ he thinks. _ You made me who I am, but today — today, I am braver than you. I am stronger than you. _ I _ know what is right. _

“Either get on board,” says Dean, “or walk away.”

He says it like he already knows the answer. He does.

Castiel walks away.

\---

Again, he drives. The opposite direction — what use are the roads he’s already traveled? He drives until the sobs threaten to tear him in two, and then he pulls over, blindly — the next turn. A right, a left, a circuit up a hill, and he’s pulling into a quiet little cemetery.

The surge of grief leaves him empty — a riptide. It goes as quickly as it came, a hollow misery bobbing in its wake.

He shifts into park and swings open his door. There’s no one else in the graveyard. It’s sunny and quiet, trees casting long shadows across the lawn. A monument in the shape of mother Mary presides, marble face unreadable, hands raised in prayer.

Castiel turns, and slams his fist into the hood of his car.

There’s a flap of wings behind him. He knows who’s there before he turns to see.

Jack looks pale and small, shoulders hunched in his jacket. “I’ve been looking for you,” he says.

Castiel takes two steps and pulls him into his arms.

\---

There are stories to be told. Of Mary, Dumah, Lucifer; Kelly Kline’s parents and the thought of a world without lies. There are plans to be made: where they’ll run to. How they’ll live, with God himself on their hunters’ side.

But they’re out of time.

\---

What comes next, Castiel will remember only in flashes, seared across his faulty, all-too-human brain:

Dean at the fence, the pistol in his hand.

The thought: _ Not without going through me. You use that gun, and it’s me you take with you. _

His world spinning, Jack’s power tossing him easily aside —

His son on his knees. The man he loves standing over him; arm straight, gun steady, eyes hard.

And the weapon discarded in the grass. It looks so small there — like a forgotten toy, gleaming too-bright in the sun.

\---

“Pick it up,” says Chuck. “_Pick it up, _ pull the trigger — and I’ll bring _ her _ back. Your mom.”

\---

Castiel can see Dean break and reassemble. It happens in front of his eyes.

“No,” he says. “No. My mom was my hero.”

He steps back. He stands with Sam.

\---

“Have it your way,” says Chuck.

Jack dies screaming.

\---

The shot —

\---

“Story’s over. Welcome to the end.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems quoted in this chapter include:
> 
> Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"  
Emily Dickinson, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant"
> 
> Quick note: as we're about to diverge from canon, this seems like a good time to say that I adore the Supernatural writers' room and have immense faith in where they're taking the story in S15. I simply wrote this fic before it started to air. :)


	14. Split the Lark

It’s dark, and Castiel is on his knees beside Jack’s body.

Dimly, he can hear Dean scrambling for Sam. “Hey, you okay?” and “Yeah — yeah, I’m good —”

Castiel can’t look away from the burned out pits of Jack’s eyes, the blackened skin. He reaches out to touch it, gently, as if he could heal the wound. But there’s nothing inside; no vital force to draw on. Only a husk.

“Wait.” That’s Sam at his side. “I thought Chuck said that the gun was the only thing that could —”

He breaks off. With great effort, Castiel pulls himself back from the pits of Jack’s eyes. He looks up.

The cemetery is dark as night — darker, somehow. He can feel a faint rumbling, in his bones or maybe his grace, of something coming near.

“He’s a writer,” he says. “Writers lie.”

The sound is growing closer, louder. Can the humans not hear it? It’s shaking the fabric of reality, lancing through the ground at their feet.

And then the Earth breaks open, and it’s here.

The first soul sears into the night sky before Castiel can quite tell what it is. The second, he glimpses — a fire of torment, caged in ribs of smoke; a howling face.

It’s what Dean would have looked like, had Castiel failed to rebuild him as he raised him. His palm tingles. 

“What the hell is happening?” Dean demands, voice gruff with fear.

It seems strange he doesn’t know. “They’re souls,” Castiel answers. “Souls from Hell.”

Another rockets free, and another. God has ripped a hole in the dividing line of the universe — living from dead, the flawed from the damned. As Castiel watches, bolts of fire tear through the earth. A gravestone goes flying in a blast of rubble. The dust clears, and there’s a human figure, stepping free — its clothing bloody and rotted, its face infected by an almost-demon’s snarl.

They’re raising bodies. All around them, corpses are clawing loose of their graves.

Castiel glances behind him; he’s on his feet, with no memory of standing. If they take Jack’s body — _ not Jack — _

He takes a step back and frees his angel blade, the hilt cool against his palm. Dean moves for the fence — was it another lifetime, that Castiel turned and saw him there, come to murder their son? — and breaks two pickets of iron loose. One for himself, one for Sam.

Dean understands what these are now: not ghosts, but not full demons, either. He has been one himself, a rack-ridden soul.

Maybe, if Castiel were strong enough — brave enough — if he loved enough — he could lay hands on each of them. He could compel them to remember what good they knew in their lives. He could find the bones to build them, the selves within them that know how to stand upright. To choose to lay down their pain.

They’re circling. Snarling. Drawing in.

Dean shifts on the balls of his feet, weapon raised, eyes wary. Castiel can see Sam’s throat bob as he swallows.

Then the creatures are on them, and the only soul Castiel can fight to save is his own.

\---

There are hands on his body, grasping, pulling. His wrists, his sleeves, his trenchcoat — his knees and his hair. Castiel shouts and shakes them off — he plunges his blade into a half-rotted chest, sweeps it free, stabs another creature through the throat — but they’re back already, too many of them, hanging their weight off him, dragging him down.

_ Dean — _Castiel thinks, or maybe shouts, and Dean is there: swinging his iron, knocking assailants clear.

There’s blood on his face. “Cas,” he says, and reaches, finding his hand — pulling him sharply close. Sam’s there too, sliding to complete their triangle again, ramming his makeshift spear through a creature’s mouth.

Castiel twists, and slashes — a corpse falls. “I don’t know why they’re so obsessed with _ you _,” Dean yells into his ear, and Castiel realizes he’s right — the mobbing swarm are clawing over each other to reach for him, falling and trampling each other beneath grimy feet.

He remembers his brothers and sisters, expiring as dozens of demons flung themselves on their wings.

“They want —” he starts, but he doesn’t know how to say it; and suddenly his eyes are caught by something else. A smaller mob of creatures, dragging something away —

It’s Jack’s body.

“_No,_” says Castiel, and the hand that grips his arm this time is Dean, strong and sure and loved, but it doesn’t matter — Castiel’s tearing free. A monster latches onto his leg as he runs, and he stabs it without looking, feels his blade nick his own thigh. It doesn’t matter. The creatures with their hands on Jack look up, hissing, and Castiel falls among them. A body down, another. He can hear someone yelling his name —

He turns, and Dean’s face is nearly invisible, separated from him by a wall of hell-souls. It keeps bobbing into view, eyes desperate, but there are monsters running for him now — far too many, more than Castiel can take alone —

He can’t kill them all. But he can draw them away.

He lowers his blade and he runs. Heart pumping, eyes stinging, away from Jack’s body, away from Sam and Dean, away and away, with these hungry senseless animals of Hell on his heels, away —

He skids to a halt where the earth drops from under his feet. There’s nothing there: just a glowing pit, a gateway, the rupture in reality itself.

Then they’re on him, and they’re covering him, knocking him forward, dragging him down, down, down.

\---

Castiel wakes in a world that is not waking.

His vision is clouded, red-black and the orange of flame. There might be a ceiling above him, or it might be his attempt to reconcile an architecture that knows no logic. He can’t move. His limbs are in chains.

_ The first thing they do, _ say Dean’s memories, _ is make sure you know. How alone you really are. _

Is this Hell? Is this what Dean felt —

“I don’t care _ who _ he is,” says a voice. “He’s an angel. I’ve been wanting one of them since — since before _ Crowley._”

_ The meat hooks, they can dig in around a bone. That’s best; tendons snap. Bones do, too, but it takes longer — _

“You’re lucky.” A hand on his face. “Those animals out there — like moths to a flame. They’ll keep flinging themselves at your grace til it consumes them. _ We _ — we’ll treat you right.”

But there are no hooks in him. Castiel tries, cautiously, to raise his head.

That’s when he feels the crown, and begins to scream.

\---

He is in Naomi’s chair, and there are spikes in his skull. Spikes and needles, probing, tripping wires — resetting him, making him anew.

_ No — _

There are voices he doesn’t remember from back then. _ How did you learn to do this? Viggo used to practice on me, before — _

He is white-hot fire. He is _ Castiel. _ He is an angel of the Lord —

The Lord —

_ No, _ he thinks, _ you cannot have me, not this time. Not this time. _

But they do.

He can feel himself spooling out, his brain sprawling in loops on the floor. Can feel his knot of identity unravel, bit by bit, every time they pull a pin. Lines of poems run out of him: _ Split the Lark - and you’ll find the Music - _

They’re going to take Jack. They’re going to take Sam. They’re going to take Dean.

He is tossing and turning in oceans. He is a creature with a thousand wings and a single eye; he probes centuries. He is scales and smoothness, the twist of water over a wicked fin.

_ I stood in a room that contained every moment — a butterfly museum. _The poem flies away.

They’re going to take all his sins and all his triumphs — the moments he brought joy or solace to a face he loved. They’re going to forge him anew — make him their weapon. Or their animal.

He is a woman, a man, a child. _ A page-boy, and a bold decision. A laughing streak of a scarlet sun — _ he is one among many. _ Crowds moved through the streets, in blindness and angst on the way to a miracle. _ He is standing still.

He is raining arrows from horseback, he is clashing swords —

He is in hell and he is in Hell, descending. Abandoned. A soldier on an impossible mission, his machinery coming apart in his mind. _ the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse _

_ O victory forget your underwear we’re free _

But he is not free. He’ll never be free, not from the infernal workings of his own existence. What has he had — ten years? Five? A few holy nights, of knowing himself complete? There are hands on his shoulders, his waist. He is dragging somewhere. He is always dragging somewhere.

He loses: _ and I will devour everything that wants to harm you. _ He loses: _ for the burden of life is love, _

He is moving, moving. Screams of rage and wails of death. He can’t feel the metal in his brain anymore, but that just means he’s more needles than self. If they turn him against Dean —

_ I have been living closer to the ocean than I thought, in a rocky cove thick with seaweed. It pulls me down when I go wading. Sometimes, to get back to land takes everything that I have in me. Sometimes, to get back to land is the worst thing a person can do. _

He is at the lake. He’s done wrong, silting it up — he’s taken it too far. It sprawls there now, a vast mud puddle, ungainly. _ Etherized upon a table. _ The sky is dim, inconsequential. Anything that lived in here must have died.

He scans the opaque water for their floating forms. And he is a floating form, naked and pale as a fishbelly, all his selfhood — _ the small graces that add up to love, to family, to memory, finally to life _ — spilling out like an oil slick, a dark rainbow, from the cracked egg of his skull.

\---

He doesn’t know how long he floats there, abandoned — unknowing, eyes staring unseeing, reliving again and again the losses, all the things that he forgot.

Dimly, he becomes aware of music. It’s a guitar, mostly, dense and jangling, repeating itself again and again; maybe strains of a voice. There’s a rhythmic sound beneath it, creeping louder, creeping closer. _ Slosh, slosh. Slosh, slosh. Slosh, slosh. _

He knows this song. _ And yesterday I saw you standing by the river. _ He’s heard this song a thousand times. _ And weren’t those tears that filled your eyes. _

Dean is standing over him, arm held high, his phone in his hand. It’s playing tinny music. The flashlight’s on; it sweeps over Castiel’s body.

_ And all the fish that lay in dirty water dying. _ Dean’s mouth quirks, one part grim, one part amused. _ Had they got you hypnotized? _

“I never thought _ you _ were the fish,” he says.

Castiel struggles to sit up. “Dean?”

“Hey, buddy.” Dean’s voice is gentle. “Wanna wake up now? We got you out.”

“No.” Castiel struggles to reconcile; that can’t be right. “I’m — I lost you. They took you away.”

Dean gestures down at himself. He’s calf-deep in water, jeans dripping. “What’m I doing here, then?”

“I — I don’t know. A trick.”

A shadow crosses Dean’s face. It is so sad, all of a sudden — so beautiful in its sadness — that Castiel can’t help but know him. Dean says, with eyes that won’t quite meet Castiel’s, “Do I look like a trick to you?”

_ But now’s the time to look and look again at what you see — is that the way it ought to stay? _

Castiel doesn’t quite dare believe it. But his mouth acts without his permission: “No.”

He sees Dean’s shoulders slump with relief. He controls it; barely lets it into his voice. “Then come on,” he says. “Let’s wake up.”

Castiel tries.

He closes his eyes as if the way to waking is through falling away to another dream. When he opens them, Dean is still standing there, muddy water swirling at his ankles, watching with a patient face. His phone is still playing music — a new song. A synthesizer builds a fortress of notes, rising and falling in turrets, gates, battlements. A curtain wall.

He’s holding the phone where Castiel can see the screen. _ Cas, _ says the title of the playlist.

“I can’t,” Castiel tells him.

Dean closes his eyes. Pain flickers behind the thin skin of his eyelids. “Cas — _ please._”

_ And if you feel — that you can’t go on — _

If he is truly free, then that means facing God’s abandonment. It means grieving Jack, again, and mending the splinters of his and Dean’s hearts. It means plunging forward into the unknown — the fight of their lives. Maybe the last fight.

_ In the light — you will find the road — _

Castiel reaches, this time. Dean’s fingers knot his together, tight.

_ You’ll find the road — _

It takes long minutes. Long creaks of the earth, long bending, expanding horizons — but the lake is filling again. A dock rises to meet their feet.

Somewhere, a nightingale is singing. And Castiel finds that he hasn’t forgotten it. He hasn’t really forgotten anything at all.

\---

He is lying on a bed in the infirmary, Dean pressed tight against him, face in his neck and hip digging into his hip. Their hands are laced together as they were in the dream, clasped to Castiel’s chest. He looks down, raising his head experimentally, and his trenchcoat is ragged and dirty, stained with blood.

Dean stirs at the movement. His head lifts, and his eyes blink, bleary. There’s blood on his face, too, the wound scabbed over now, and Castiel reaches, instinctive, to heal him.

“Hey, hey,” says Dean, catching his hand. “No, n-no. I’m fine. You’re recovering.”

Across the room, a throat clears, and Castiel turns his head. Sam looks worse for the wear, too, but alive. His iron picket is lying on the floor next to him like he dropped it there, caked in dirt and blood. He’s got his laptop open on one of the instrument tables. “Welcome back, Cas.”

Castiel sits up. Dean slides off the bed to make room for him, but he doesn’t let go of his hand. “I was in Hell?”

“For an hour or two.” Dean’s eyes are very still on his face. “So — longer, down there.”

“They had a —” He can’t quite bring himself to say it out loud. He gestures toward his head, the crown that clamped there, the instruments that burrowed into his brain.

Dean’s voice is gentle, striving for modulation. “I know, Cas. I took it off you.” His composure cracks. “I tried not to hurt you, but —”

He cuts off, chest spasming without a sound. Castiel reaches to touch his face, and Dean turns blindly into it, the line of his nose tickling Castiel’s palm.

They stay like that for a long moment, two. Castiel doesn’t mean to draw the image from Dean’s mind, but he can’t help but picture it: Dean bent over another screaming soul, hands at work on another implement of torture.

Again, Sam clears his throat.

When Castiel looks up, he speaks. “Your tactic to draw them away worked. We were able to retrieve Jack’s body —” he nods to the table across the room, and Castiel sees for the first time that there’s a human form under the sheet — “and then make a plan. Some of the demons are, I guess, still loyal to me.”

He grimaces on the words. Castiel glances at Dean, who picks up the story, voice soft and rough. “We got the crown off, got you out of there. But you were still — living in it, I guess. You wouldn’t wake up.”

“So then Dean takes a double dose of sleeping pills and crashes out next to you with about three syllables of explanation,” Sam finishes drily. “And here we are.”

Castiel glances at Dean. His eyes are still half-closed, cheek still pressed to Castiel’s hand. “We should probably tell him we’re,” Castiel suggests, though the end of his own sentence fails him.

“Yeah, no,” says Sam, “I got it.” He raises his hands; then suddenly — swift and bright — he smiles. “Took you long enough.”

Dean snorts. “Blame Cas.”

“I blame both of you,” Sam informs them, but then his smile fades, because Castiel is sliding off the bed. Standing and crossing the room — he only wobbles a little.

He rests a hand on the sheet, for a moment, before pulling it free.

Jack’s eyes are still burned sightless. His face is still peaceful, smiling slightly, calm. He’s gone.

“Cas —”

It’s Sam and Dean, both at once. They’re at his shoulders, and he can feel rather than see — the ease of long familiarity — Sam glance across, deferring to Dean.

It takes a moment for Dean to continue. His voice is rough when he does, a little choked. “I’m so sorry.”

Castiel doesn’t answer. Just reaches to hold his hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems and songs quoted in this chapter include:
> 
> Emily Dickinson, "Split the Lark - and you'll find the Music"  
Tomas Tranströmer, "Secrets on the Way"  
Edith Södergran, "Vierge Moderne"  
Tomas Tranströmer, "Kyrie"  
Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"  
Hannah Faith Notess, "Yoshi (A Pastoral)"  
Allen Ginsberg, "Song"  
Jane Mead, "I have been living"  
T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock"  
Craig Morgan Teicher, "Another Day"  
Led Zeppelin, "That's the Way"  
Led Zeppelin, "In the Light"


	15. These Hands, If Not Gods

There’s information to be gathered, plans to be made. Sam’s demonic allies have shored up the gates of Hell, for now, but the souls that are already loose — _ how many? _ — need to be dealt with. By the end of the day, Sam has three laptops open on the library table, each conducting a different crawl of news sites, social media. He has Charlie on the phone, bouncing off ideas. Dean’s making calls to hunters. Rowena’s already on her way.

Castiel is on enforced bed rest, which in reality means he floats around the bunker like Dean’s shadow, holding a blanket clutched to his shoulders, which Dean seems to regard as the bare minimum of compliance.

“I’m fine,” he keeps telling them, “I can help,” and Dean pauses to kiss him, swift and daring, and take both his shoulders and say: “Cas, I know. But you’re helping me right now. Okay?”

They haven’t talked about it. Not really. The rift between them, and whether it’s repaired.

They _ don’t_, until late that night, when Dean comes up short in his proprietary herding of Castiel toward an actual bed.

They’re at a junction in the corridors. Left leads to Castiel’s room; right, to Dean’s.

Dean’s hand, pressed to the small of Castiel’s back, falters. “Cas —”

Castiel turns. He can remember, as if through a pane of glass, what the version of him who was ready to leave Dean felt like. He can remember it, but he can’t want anything to do with it. Not today, not after everything, not now.

He takes Dean’s hand and tugs him, wordless, down the right-hand corridor. But Dean doesn’t budge.

“What stopped me,” he says instead. “I — there I am, just looking down at the kid, and he looks _ so fucking much _like you.”

Castiel goes still.

“It’s a dumb reason,” says Dean. “It should be because — it was wrong. Which it was, or ‘cause he’s family, or ‘cause I — love him. Loved him. And I _ do. _ But I already knew that, that’s not what made me stop. I just — never noticed, how he looked like you.”

Castiel’s eyes are on the tile of the wall, but suddenly he’s seeing Jack instead: Jack’s face, laughing, smiling. Jack intent at a task.

“He — thought of me as his father, before his birth.” The voice doesn’t sound like his own. “He may have — molded his human form based on that, in some way.”

“That’s not what he said to us.”

Castiel looks up, sucking in a breath. Dean’s frowning. Perhaps he’s wrong. Perhaps he has never been as important to Jack as he liked to imagine. It wouldn’t be the first time; hubris is one of his many flaws.

But Dean’s eyebrows are drawn together, remembering. “No, it was — he _ chose _ you as his father. That’s how he said it.”

_ Oh. _

This time, when Castiel tugs Dean’s arm, Dean lets him take control. Lets Castiel guide him down the corridor and into his own bedroom, with its warm lights and its well loved books and records on the shelf. Lets Castiel bully him out of jeans and shoes and socks — he’s yawning, as exhausted as Castiel is or more — and into the sheets. Curls up with Castiel against him, fingers tangled in fingers, in hair, and drops easily into the sleep of the weary, and doesn’t wake again until morning.

\---

The next day, it’s time to build the pyre.

There have been so many of these this year. The ritual is familiar: the _ thunk _ and _ chop _ of an ax in young wood. Framing it out, finding kindling in the dry sticks on the ground. Castiel helps haul the logs and secure them upright until his human muscles ache.

Sam and Dean work together in silence, their rhythms familiar, effortless. They have done this for him, Castiel knows. They have done this for him, and for their mother, and for their father, all those years ago.

When it’s finished, Sam nods tightly. Dean reaches out to grip his shoulder in one hand — then Cas’s with the other.

Then they gather their tools and go back inside for the body.

Billie is waiting for them.

She’s standing in the infirmary in front of Jack’s body, hands clasped before her, face impassive. There’s no scythe in her hands, but the pale ring gleams on her finger. She carries a scent with her that Castiel always knows, of warm earth and salt breezes, a faintness of frankincense or myrrh.

Dean freezes at the door when he sees her. Then he shoulders in first. “What do _ you _ want?”

Billie doesn’t answer right away. Her eyes travel over them. “Hello, Dean. Sam. Castiel.”

Sam’s throat bobs. Castiel meets Billie’s gaze. “Hello.”

Dean spares him an incredulous glance, then looks back at Billie. “Yeah, okay,” he says, roughly, “so what do you want?”

She smiles, at that. Then turns, to the sheet-covered body behind her. She lays a hand on Jack’s chest, as gentle and as heavy as the weight of the world.

For a moment, Castiel thinks she will sweep the sheet away. But she doesn’t, just turns back to them and says: “Give me a day.”

“A —” Dean blinks, incredulous. “I’m sorry, a _ what?_”

“A day.” Billie folds her hands again. “I may have a plan. I need more time to put it into action.”

Castiel steps forward, ignoring Dean’s muffled sound of protest as he circumvents the protective tension of his shoulders. “You have a plan to — bring Jack back to us?”

Billie turns her head minutely to look at him, as though an insect has spoken aloud. She says, with slow, dripping clarity: “_Maybe._”

Out of the corner of Castiel’s eye, he sees a stutter to Sam’s movements. “Well —”

“Hang on,” Dean interrupts. “Hang on. Aren’t you forgetting something? _ You _ told _ me _ the only way to defeat Michael was a Ma’lak Box ride to the bottom of the ocean. Well — we killed him, sister, and I’m still here. So —” his voice trembles — “_what gives?_”

Castiel glances at him sharply, quelling; then back at Death. But if Dean’s offended Billie, she doesn’t show it. Merely tips her chin over her shoulder again to glance at the form under the sheet. “He does.”

Dean opens his mouth to bite back a response, then stops short, blinking. Castiel’s eyes catch on Jack’s body, and then he can’t look away.

If they could have him back —

“I think you’d better tell us what you’re talking about,” Sam says, quietly.

Billie inclines her head. “As long as he has existed, your Jack has been the — exception to the rules. The spanner in the works, you might say,” and Castiel glances at her swiftly, but she doesn’t acknowledge him with even a flick of her eyes. “If God thinks he can throw a tantrum and hurl _ my _ universe to the wolves — well. I could use a weapon like him, in that fight.”

Castiel takes another step forward. “Jack is not your weapon.”

This time, Billie looks at him properly. The full blast of her gaze hits him — promises blooming unseen in the darkness, something of life after life. She could crush Castiel where he stands. She could hurl him into the Empty; she could break his deal. All without lifting a finger.

“No, he’s not,” she agrees, at last. “Which is the point.”

And she’s turning, laying a hand on Jack’s body one last time. “A day,” she says, again. “Before you offer him to me. No guarantees. Nice pyre.”

And she’s gone.

Dean staggers, physically, into the silence she leaves behind. Sam makes a low sound in his throat. He turns, running a hand through his hair once, again. His hands are trembling. “Do you think she really —?”

Castiel can’t tear his eyes from Jack’s motionless body. “I think she’s deadly serious,” he says. “I have no idea if her plan will work.”

“If we get Jack back,” Sam starts, “do you think he’ll have a soul, or, or powers, or —”

“I don’t know,” Castiel says.

Dean is staring at him. His mouth trembles, for an instant, with words that don’t come.

“It sounds like she thinks God isn’t done,” Sam adds. “Like — what we’re dealing with now, trying to close the Hell gate properly again — that’s far from the worst we might have to face from him.”

Castiel doesn’t know what to say. Dean makes a faint noise, undefinable, then says, “I need a — a drink,” and pushes himself off the wall, stumbling once as he makes his blind way from the room.

Sam and Castiel stare at each other for a moment.

“Is he —?”

“I — think you’d better,” says Sam. He inclines his head.

“Yes,” agrees Castiel, and goes.

\---

Dean is in his bedroom. There’s a bottle of whiskey with him, a glass on the table, cradled between his palms, but he’s not drinking. It’s full almost to the brim.

He looks up when Castiel opens the door, back down as he closes it behind him with a _ click. _ “I’m sorry for freaking out,” he says, voice rough, “it’s just — all hitting me now, or somethin’.”

“Jack?” Castiel asks, sitting down on the bench by the foot of the bed.

Dean drops his chin, swiftly. He raises the whiskey to his lips, tilts the glass until the liquid just meets his mouth — then grimaces and sets it down again. “Jack. Mom. You, Sam, God, I — I dunno, Cas, I’m —”

He cuts off abruptly, raises both hands to scrub at his face. Castiel goes to him.

He sinks to his knees on the floor before Dean’s chair, running both palms up his thighs. Dean hiccups a breath, and drops his hands, and Castiel gathers them. Presses a kiss to each one, the fine skin over Dean’s veins.

“I just — I spent my _ whole life _ tryin’ to make sure nothing bad ever happened to that kid,” says Dean. It takes Castiel a moment to catch up — Sam; they’re talking about Sam. “And I failed — fucking _ spectacularly. _ And if it’s just —”

Castiel understands. “You never could have protected him. Not with God pulling the strings.”

There’s a low, wounded sound caught in Dean’s throat. “Maybe. I dunno. If you told me twenty years ago it was me versus God and Sam on the line, I’d —”

He can just imagine it. Castiel smiles. “You’d have gone in shotguns blazing. Filled him with rock salt, to start with.”

“I mean, yeah.” Dean laughs. “Not like it woulda done much good, but — I’d have _ tried._”

“You can’t change the past,” Castiel points out, and kisses Dean’s knuckles once, again.

Dean shifts against him and says, “Yeah, I _ get _ that, but I — I let it stop me from trying with anyone else. Jack, or, or Kevin, or —” He breaks off, then forces himself to go on. “Like, if I can’t protect my own little brother, then — what —”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Castiel tells him. “Even if it _ hadn’t _ been God laying mines for you. It was far too much to put on a single human soul. Never mind a child.”

Dean draws in a shaky breath.

“Besides,” says Castiel, “you raised _ Sam Winchester. _ I don’t know if you’ve met him, but —”

That pulls another small laugh from Dean’s lungs.

They stay there for a moment like that, hands clasped together, whiskey on the table. Castiel bows his head, touches his temple to Dean’s knee.

It seems to bump another confession loose. “You were the first,” Dean says, “the first person I —”

He breaks off. And Castiel understands: there are no good words for this, no vocabulary designed for the revelation that your entire life has been that of a mouse in a cage, running up wheels that will only turn faster the harder you try.

Castiel has been a mouse in a cage for a long, long time.

“The first person you loved without trying to save,” he suggests. “And then you saved me anyway.”

Dean makes a sound in his throat. It turns into, “_Cas,_” and he’s bending nearly in two, tipping Castiel’s chin up to kiss him, and Castiel rises to meet him. Clutches a hand around the back of Dean’s neck, white-knuckled, and kisses him and kisses him, like planets could fall and he wouldn’t let go of Dean’s touch.

\---

They find themselves tangled in bedsheets, that night. A twist of cotton around their calves. The blanket caught behind Dean’s shoulder. Castiel can’t rear back against it, can’t sit up, and he doesn’t want to. He wants to touch every part of Dean — wants to feel Dean’s breath flutter in his own chest. He wants the involuntary cant of hips when he does something Dean likes; he wants the half-swallowed curses in his ear.

There are so many things he still needs to tell Dean. About his life before they met; about all the things he forgot. And the privilege of _ remembering _— he will never, he wants to tell him, he will never, never know a greater gift than having Dean to remember, piece by beautiful piece.

That’s for another time. Castiel digs his thumbs into muscle; he grazes teeth over skin. He presses thigh to thigh and knee in the crook of knee; he spreads Dean out and spreads himself, imperfect mirror that he is. He lets Dean’s hands roam everywhere they can reach and shivers under the touch, until Dean’s breath is coming sharp and fast beneath him and he’s gasping, “Cas — _ please _ —”

The sex itself is wordless. Necessary, elemental; breath to breath and teeth to jaw. Castiel doesn’t know where he ends and Dean begins, but he can’t stop touching. Can’t stop drinking in every breath, every wash of pleasure, until the waves build and build and they’re a tide, rolling over him, over Dean, and they’re pressed to each other and coming down from the heavens and laughing, incredulous, at all that they are and can be.

Afterward, Castiel rolls off Dean. They adjust the blankets, freeing imprisoned ankles, crowd close again with heavy sighs.

Castiel rolls a careful thumb over each of Dean’s ribs. Dean’s face is so close it’s barely in focus, but Castiel can feel his breath hitch, his muscles shiver as he relaxes, again, into Castiel’s touch. Down his sternum, across the gentle plane of his stomach — now taut, now soft. The sharp lines of his hips and the soft hair that curls between them.

Dean sighs, settling into the touch. “Thought you said I should get some sleep.”

It’s true; Castiel did say that. “I’m watching over you,” he points out, which prompts Dean to a surprised laugh. It starts slow, in his belly, and crinkles the lines around his eyes. Castiel leans in to kiss them.

When Dean blinks up at him again, there’s warmth in his gaze, but a question, too. Castiel stills, right hand on Dean’s hip, left reaching to brush his face. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” says Dean automatically, shuttering. Then: “I — it shouldn’t even faze me, after everything else. God betraying us. It shouldn’t, but it does.”

Castiel hums agreement. He turns his hand, running the backs of his fingers over the stubble on Dean’s cheek.

Dean adds, “You seem fine.”

Is he fine? Castiel considers.

He is alive. He has lost so much, but not Dean — not Sam. Maybe even not Jack. And the fight they’re in —

It’s just another version of the old fight. The fight he’s always been in, since the day he was born; at least now he knows it. At least now he knows it can’t take everything from him — not his memory. Not the life he’s lived.

If all the rules are breaking, maybe he can too.

Maybe he can be happy. Maybe he can be free.

His knuckles brush Dean’s lips, and he lets them rest there. “I learned a long time ago what to have faith in.”

Dean’s eyes are half-lidded — hypnotized. Castiel runs his fingers again over his hipbone; circles the hollow inside of it. A sigh gusts out of Dean’s mouth, and his knee crooks, legs falling open. “Your _ hands, _ Jesus.”

Castiel thinks about it. Then he curves a thumb over Dean’s jaw and quotes, deliberately: “_Haven’t they moved like rivers — like Glory, like light — over the seven days of your body? And wasn’t that good?_”

He can see the whole-body shiver steal over Dean. The gooseflesh, the paralyzed tension that dissolves again as his breath punches out of him. Castiel bends low to kiss his skin. “_Them at your hips —_”

“_Cas,_” says Dean, helpless, “are you quoting — fucking poetry —”

Castiel doesn’t need to quiet him; Dean does it himself. He lets his hands follow the words, then skate up over Dean’s sides, palms flat across his chest. “_Finally, a sin worth hurting for. Finally, a sweet, a _You are mine.”

“Yours,” breathes Dean in agreement, helpless, and Castiel is helpless, too; his heart clenches with love. He traces the lines of Dean’s collarbone, the swell of his shoulder.

“_It is hard not to have faith in this,_” he tells him. _ “From the blue-brown clay of night these two potters crushed and smoothed you into being — grind, then curve — built your form up — atlas of bone, fields of muscle.” _

As he speaks, he gives up the truth in it. He made Dean, once, built him a body and raised him from bleeding intention into something solid and whole, but that was nothing to this. That was work; this is _ light _.

“_The beautiful making they do — of trigger and carve, suffering and stars —_”

Dean’s breath is coming fast. Cas kisses him, once, again, uses one hand to tilt Dean’s chin, trace his Adam’s apple, the column of his throat. The other wanders down again, between Dean’s legs — the stirring of renewed interest there. His fingers tease, and orbit away. “_Aren’t they, too, the dark carpenters of your small church? Have they not burned on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor, to nectareous feast?_”

Dean surges up to kiss him, but Castiel catches him with a finger to his lips. Bears him gently back down. “_Haven’t they riveted your wrists, haven’t they — had you at your knees?_”

A punched-out sound escapes Dean’s lungs. His belly quivers, and his hips strain. Castiel laughs, low and delighted, and bends closer, letting his own lips brush the joint of his finger as Dean sucks it, desperate, into his mouth. “_And when these hands touched your throat, showed you how to take the apple _ and _ the rib, how to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all, __didn’t you sing out their ninety-nine names —_”

Dean comes apart.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch. Castiel could do this every day for eternity — watch the shadows and the sweat alchemize in the hollows of Dean’s cheekbones, watch his lips part and press together. Watch his eyes move like water-shadows under gilded eyelids, and watch them snap open, green and naked with need. He could track the hitches of Dean’s ribcage until he knows them by heart — a secret semaphore. He could read him every word he’s ever known. 

“_And when you cried out, _ O, Prometheans," he quotes, and his own voice is cracking, “_didn’t they bring fire?_”

“_Yes, _ fuck, _ Cas,_” says Dean, and hauls Castiel down by the back of his neck to seal their mouths together.

It’s a while before they remember to breathe. A while, before the shaking in Castiel’s body subsides enough to lever himself up; before he can grasp the enormity of it all. In this world, with all its betrayals, they have _ this. _It’s enough.

He presses his face to Dean’s neck. Can taste the faint tang of sweat there, warm and clean. He murmurs, and he could be talking to himself:

“_These hands, if not gods, then why — when you have come to me, and I have returned you to that from which you came — bright mud, mineral-salt — why then do you whisper —_”

Dean cups a hand around the back of his neck. He turns his face into Castiel’s hair. “_Cas,_” he breathes. “I mean — damn.”

Castiel smiles. He knows Dean can feel it against his skin.

It’s not the line, but it’ll do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poems quoted in this chapter include:
> 
> Natalie Diaz, "These Hands, If Not Gods"
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed. And don't forget to run over to [Bees](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeesAreAwesome) and compliment her on her incredible [art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21271547)!
> 
> [Edited to add, 9/20/20: I just wrote a short fic that is, in my head, something of a coda to this one — though it could be the ending of many different stories too. It does have a poem in it. And a happy ending. If you're interested: [Some Thoughts You Have While Falling](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26560237).]


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